


Go Outside

by Birdhouse



Category: Journeyman
Genre: Cults, Gen, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-23
Updated: 2012-04-23
Packaged: 2017-11-04 05:22:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 27,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/390224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Birdhouse/pseuds/Birdhouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan finds himself traveling to help a little girl survive a troubled childhood as the Princess of a cult, but when the members of that cult find ways to get their grips on him in his present, he has to figure out how to survive long enough to fix their past and all of their futures.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_ July 21, 1969 _

_“In the year 2525, if man is still alive…”_

The old, familiar song filled the heated air; the tone tinnier than Dan Vassar remembered. He shook his head as awareness slowly returned and he found himself wedged between a bushel basket of avocadoes and a pyramid of canned cat food, a full shopping basket hanging from his arm.

“Mommy, mommy, look! He’s from Star Trek!”

Dan spun to see a little boy with too-big ears and a gap-toothed grin pointing at him, eyes wide under the floppy brim of his cowboy hat. His mother, a harried looking woman in a sundress, hurriedly reached out and snatched his hand, tugged the boy behind her.

“Don’t say things like that, it’s rude,” she scolded her voice strident, so familiar that Dan just about had to laugh. _Sounds like Mom._

“But he just appeared! Out of thin air! Scotty beamed him dow-“

“Dylan! Stop it!” She shook her son’s hand, and looked at Dan apologetically. “I’m sorry, sir, kids these days…”

Dan laughed, a bit, shaking his head. “It’s alright, believe me. I know. It’s no harm done, really.” He shifted the basket so the different logos on the milk jugs, the _best if sold by_ date of May 12, 2008 wouldn’t be readable. “He should be a writer.”  Dylan’s mom blustered, looking halfway between flustered and pleased. He might have been tempted to stay in chat, but the feeling – that niggling, nagging sense of premonition that always accompanied the right track – wasn’t here, so he excused himself and made his wary way towards the front of the grocery store.

Supermarkets were a newfangled thing in the 1960s. They hadn’t discovered the same correct, uneasy balance of futility and advertising as their modern counterpoints. It was, as a result, easy to find his way to the front counter.

A very pregnant young lady stood at that counter, her narrow face buried in a newspaper. The front headline read, in huge text, _U.S._ _ASTRONAUTS WALK ON MOON…_

And there was the feeling.

“Wow,” Dan said aloud, reaching out for a copy of the paper, over the feeling of _when do I get to track him _that he usually felt for famous figures. “Kennedy was right.”

The woman – barely more than a girl, really – didn’t look up from her paper, though she went very still. It reminded Dan of nothing more than a little mouse, just spotting a hawk.

“K-Kennedy?”

“He said we’d put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.” Dan shook the wrinkles out of the paper, feeling that little sensation of confirmation tugging at his brain. This woman – or someone close to her – was his target. “He was right. Amazing, huh?”

“Oh. Yes. I guess.” Her voice was soft, shy. It reminded him all the more of that little rodent, creeping along some field.

“Seems like it’s a long way from Sputnik.” Silence fell around the newspaper rack. Dan kept sneaking peeks at the young woman. She was small and would have been thin if it wasn’t for the swell of her belly; the stereotypical picture of a hippie in beads, charms and buckskins, her long, straight brown hair pulled back in a single smooth braid.

“My dad used to talk about Sputnik,” she finally said, almost wistful. “He thought it would all stop with the satellites. Guess he was wrong…”

“It’s only going to move faster from here,” Dan replied. “Your little one’s going to grow up in a strange new world.” The girl laughed at that; a high, tight, almost-hurt sound. Dan frowned, pressed on. “When’s the baby due?”

Pale grey eyes met Dan’s bright blue over the top of the paper. Dan smiled, non-threatening, shifting his hand so his wedding ring flashed. “I still remember when my son was born. I thought his mother was going to kill me before he came…”

The girl laughed, faintly, at that. “The doctor said it could be a month,” she said, looking down at her stomach. “And…the thought has come to my mind, once or twice.” Something crossed her face when she said it, like a cloud over a field of wheat. Dan’s gut gave another twinge of foreboding. “I…this is a bit…unexpected.”

“You didn’t want a kid?”

“No, that’s…we’ve…I’ve only known Jeremy, uhm. M-my husband, that is. I’ve only known him for a year, we…” A blush was starting to creep up the young woman’s freckled cheeks. Dan shifted a little further away, just to give her space. “We hadn’t….didn’t really talk about kids. _Before_. Sometimes I think he only married me because….” Her hand drifted over her stomach again, and Dan winced when she pulled up her paper again, effectively creating a wall between her and him.

“Oh, there you are, Dan!” Livia’s smooth, half-expected voice soothed over some of the disorientation of displacement in his mind. Dan turned just as she wrapped her arm around his waist, brushed a chaste kiss across his cheek.

“Livia! I was just about to tell-” He trailed off, fishing for a name.

The woman knew it, too, judging by her look, but she said, softly, “Rachel.”

Dan smiled at her warmly before turning back to Livia, “-Rachel here about Zack.”

“..You were?”

“Yeah. About how he…” He scratched the side of his head, going for a sheepish look more than anything. “About how we weren’t married when…”

Livia, as always, caught on quickly, though something glimmered in her eyes that Dan knew he should be apologizing for later. “Oh, oh, that…” She shook her head, her expression a familiar one: reassurance. “You can work past that, sweetheart; we’ve been happily married-” Again, there was that _something_ – “For seven years now.”

“Zack’s the light of my life.” Dan picked up the thread of the conversation as he tried to follow the swell of the instincts, rubbing his hand across his hair again. “Stick it out; you’ll make it. I promise.”

Livia tugged on his arm, then, insistently.

“Dan, now-”

“What’re you looking at?” Whatever Livia was going to say was cut off by a low, harsh voice. Rachel dropped the newspaper; Dan managed not to jump, but only just barely, held still by Livia’s sudden grip on his bicep, eyes drawn to the floor. The air rustled as a bony hand closed around the fallen paper, folding it back together neatly. The speaker stood, every movement carefully controlled.

Dangerous.

_You’re not the hawk here, Dan,_ he realized. _It wasn’t ever you she was worried about._

“I…Jeremy…” Rachel’s voice didn’t quite quaver, but the edge was there. She was close. “I wasn’t….looking at anything.”

The tall, leggy man who had startled them all shoved the paper back into the rack. His hair was dark blonde and shaggy, his broad shoulders tense beneath his flowing white shirt. He took a long time arranging the papers, pointedly ignoring his audience. When he finally turned, his stormy green eyes snapped with electricity –

And Dan found himself staring into a face he’d last seen thirty years older. He swallowed hard, fighting the sudden surge of fear that spiked through him.

_Jeremy Kaplan._

“Bullshit.” Jeremy growled back at Rachel, still disregarding Dan and Livia as he grabbed her slender wrist and pulled her closer. She tried to jerk away, and Jeremy’s long fingers tightened. Dan watched warily, every instinct saying to interfere here, that something wasn’t right, somehow. 

“Let _go_ ,” Rachel said, but the defiance faded away just as quickly as it had flared up when Jeremy didn’t move; his thin lips parted in a cat-like smile, almost as if entertained.

_Alright, that’s it._

“Hey,” Dan rumbled, voice low as he pulled against Livia’s hand on his arm, “she _said_ let _go_.”

Jeremy paused, head cocked, his eyes not moving from his wife’s frightened face. She gave a tiny, scared shake of her head before his smirk widened and he let go, rounding on Dan smoothly. His voice was cool, bored.

“You tellin’ me what to do, now?” He asked, stepping closer, and Dan fought the future-knowledge of everything this man had the potential to become, the urge to step back; turn and run and keep running.

“Possibly?” The word came out more like a question than he would have preferred, but he squared his shoulders anyway, ready for a fight if it came down to it. It wouldn’t be an unfair fight, at least not physically - what Jeremy had in height, Dan more than made up for in weight.

_What you don’t have is an effective form of counter-insanity._

Jeremy leaned into Dan’s personal space, and Dan took that step backwards, Livia’s fingers tight, reassuring around his bicep; reminding him that, even here, he wasn’t completely on his own. “And if I don’t?”

Dan met Rachel’s worried stare for a moment past Jeremy before looking back to those electric eyes. “Then…we’re going to have a problem.”

“Oh.” For a second, Jeremy looked away, the tension in his shoulders ebbing ever so slightly. Dan watched him still, warily taking a step further away. If he wasn’t entirely mistaken, if this wasn’t Jeremy Kaplan, _the_ Jeremy Kaplan, everything would be ok.

_But if it was…_

Jeremy moved too fast for Dan to entirely follow, but his eyes focused on the knife with no problem. The blade was easily three quarters of a foot long, flashing in the florescent lights. Dan barely scrambled out of the way in time as it slashed through the stack of papers like they were butter. Livia dove the other way.

“Hey, whoa whoa whoa, I don’t know if it’s that _big_ a problem!” Dan blathered when Jeremy slashed out again, hitting one of the milk jugs in the process. It split around the knife blade; Dan yanked it out of the basket, ignoring the cold splash against his shirt, and threw it. The half-full jug hit Jeremy in the face, drenching him with milk.

Dan didn’t wait to see the results. He legged it for the back alley instead, the madman hot on his heels.

The back door opened onto an alley. Dan charged down it, leaving a trail of white in his wake as his shirt dripped. He had almost made it to the mouth of the alley when he saw movement there and skidded to a stop.

He nearly run into a wall of people – six or seven men, dressed eerily similar to each another, all with equally angry looks on their faces. He gulped as he glanced over his shoulder. Livia was nowhere in sight, but Jeremy was advancing, his knife flashing in the dim light of the alley. He jerked his chin towards his friends, something wild in his eyes.

“Hold him still for me, eh?”

The tallest of the group – taller than Kaplan, certainly taller than Dan, and heavier built than both – stepped forward, grinding his knuckles into his palm in an almost stereotypical gangster move. Dan took another step back, torn between the instinct that drew him on and the very real fear at the edge of that knife.  
  
“Can’t we talk about this?” Jeremy shook his head, flipping the knife from hand to hand with an almost playful quirk to his mouth. Kaplan’s man just kept prowling forward, moving too much like a tiger for Dan to breathe easily. “No such luck?”

“Not today,” Jeremy said lightly, nodding to his friend again. A huge, cold hand clamped down on the back of Dan’s neck, but the instinct froze him in place, kept him from lashing backwards or striking out. “Tomorrow’s not looking too good for you, either.”

“Dan!” Livia’s voice drew all of their attentions, sharp in the tension of the alleyway. Dan bit his lip, looking over Jeremy’s shoulder. Livia stood in the doorway, her arm around Rachel’s shoulder, concern in every line of her face. Rachel’s hand rested on her belly, fear in her eyes.

And the ground beneath her feet…

_Jeremy, just look…_

“Jeremy,” Rachel said, softly – Jeremy didn’t respond; Dan shifted, trying to keep his eyes on everyone at the same time. “Jeremy!” This time, her voice was higher, louder, more insistent. Jeremy still didn’t look her way as he raised the knife high. Dan planted his feet, spine rigid, trying not to squirm from the hand on his neck, feeling the pressure growing in his head.

“Jeremy!” he barked.

“What?” Jeremy’s voice was almost plaintive; whiny, but the knife didn’t move. Dan forced himself not to look at it, not to even acknowledge it existed.

“I think Rachel’s water just broke.”

The last thing Dan saw before the lights flared behind his eyes to carry him home was Jeremy dropping the knife and running to his wife’s side.

  



	2. Chapter 2

_2008_

Returning to the present always left Dan discombobulated and half-starved, though this time Fate or God or whatever higher power was pulling his strings had been kind enough to leave him in an alley, alone. He shook his head, blinking the disorientation from his eyes as he stepped out onto the street, already looking around for landmarks.

Jefferson’s Deli caught his eye first, and he couldn’t help but grin. He was two blocks away from his job at the San Francisco Register. Sure, he still clutched a shopping basket of inadvertently shoplifted merchandise, but at least he knew where he was.

 _And that,_ he thought as he ditched everything but the cereal in the nearest dumpster (basket and all), _is usually half the battle._

The milk-splashed shirt clung to him in places and he was on the receiving end of more than a few strange looks as he made the rest of the trip to the newspaper’s big offices through the early-spring crowds. It made more sense to go _there_ and try and get a head-start on things, before he had to face Katie smelly, freaked out and high on forty-year-old adrenaline.

_And I can’t even change._

His emergency stash of clothes at work was gone - an incident earlier in the month with a race-car had ended spectacularly bad, and he hadn’t replaced the oil-stained clothes yet - but he could at least get some of the research done.

He hurried up the stairs, through the door and down the hallway towards his desk with a single-minded purpose, uninterrupted by coworkers wanting to gossip about the latest layoff rumors. Honestly, if it hadn’t been for the Christmas scare – and his _ending_ that scare thirty years before if began - he would have been convinced that the rumors were just the management playing mind-games.

_And I don’t think even they would freak me out right now._

He could still see Jeremy’s familiar, smirking face when he let himself think, see the flash of the knife-blade in that dead-end alley. The implications it had for this particular journey…he shivered despite himself, trying not to go too far down that path just yet.

The clock on the corner of his desk proudly proclaimed that it was one p.m. when he flopped down, and he winced. He’d left the house at eight, as soon as they’d put Zack on the bus.

_Guess we can add grocery shopping to the list of things I can’t do unsupervised._

  
Now that he was sitting down and waiting for the computer to boot up, now that his mind had idle time, he could allow himself to really _think_ about how many ways this could possibly go _wrong_.

Almost forty years ago - the very summer Dan had just visited - Jeremy Kaplan had risen as San Francisco’s answer to Charles Manson or a precursor to Marshall Applewhite – or possibly both, with a side of Jim Jones thrown in for the fun of it. Charismatic and intelligent; manipulative and utterly _insane_ , he’d done what any self-respecting lunatic in the 60’s did. He had started a cult: The Court of the Ninth Star King.

Of course, no one really knew what being a member of the Court entailed; there had never been a single document found, no rules or bylaws, and the few members arrested had never talked about their time spent in the compound north of the city; kept silent by fear or fervor, no one had never been able to tell which.

_And it wasn’t really high on my bucket list, either._

His computer announced with a friendly chime that it was booted up, drawing him from his thoughts. He opened the folder with all his rough drafts, his interview transcripts, his first-impression notes and all the work that went in to his published articles. The subfolder he was looking for was one of the oldest; it hadn’t been touched since August of 2004.

_Kaplan._

Just looking at the folder brought it all flooding back.

“Thinking of doing a follow-up story?”

Dan yelped, almost jumping out of his seat at the unexpected voice. Hugh Skillen stood there, hands raised in surrender.

“Woah, woah, just…asked a question.” The editor looked at Dan’s computer screen before smiling, tightly. “Guilty conscience?”

“Nah.” Dan spun his chair around, looking at the folder as he willed his heartbeat to return to its normal pace. “I _was_ thinking about doing a follow-up. That was a pretty good story…”

Hugh snorted, leaning on the desk. “Yeah, sure, if you like learning about nutcases.”

“Hey, don’t knock it! Nutcases sell newspapers.” Maybe it was cynical, but there it was. “I mean, look at Charles Manson. How long has _he_ been in jail? How often is _he_ in the news? People love a good cult story.”

Hugh just fell silent, eying him balefully for a long moment before shaking his head. “Whatever.” Dan tried not to smirk in triumph. “So, talk to me. Why do you think it needs a follow-up?”  
  
Dan looked at the screen again, opening some files and carefully avoiding others. The transcript of his interview flashed onscreen.

“I kind of…just want to talk to the guy, see if anything’s changed since…”

“Dan. He practically _skinned a guy alive_ the night he was arrested. He’s spent _thirty years_ behind bars. I don’t think things are going to have changed that dramatically in the last four.”

The Court had been under suspicion for everything from polygamy to tax evasion to murder, but the police hadn’t had anything concrete. They usually kept the compound under surveillance, waiting for any sign, any excuse to head in.

They hadn’t had any such excuse until June 20, 1974, when the surveillance teams and neighbors alike had reported screams – mad screams, barely human. Desperate.

The subsequent raid had not gone well. There had been four survivors from the Court, period – and the bodies in the back garden had been more than enough to keep those survivors in jail for life.

Rachel Kaplan had not been one of those survivors, and neither had the one who screamed – a Brian Fleming, one of Kaplan’s men; someone the task force had seen as something of a lieutenant. Someone Dan now recognized. 

Brian had been the one Kaplan ordered to hold him back in the alley.  

He remembered Jeremy _telling_ him about the killing in the interview, too; the words floating about halfway down the page: _I think if he hadn’t screamed, it all would have been different somehow_. He shivered at the memory.

“‘ _I guess_ ,’” Hugh leaned over Dan’s shoulder to squint at the interview transcript, reading off the first line. “‘ _you don’t know me very well yet, do you?_ ’ What the heck…you never told me that’s how he started off…”

“Because it wasn’t important!” Dan barked back, minimizing the file and glaring at his boss. “He was just…trying to fluster me. I think.”

At least, that’s what he had thought back then, sitting in the tiny room they’d arranged for the interview. Now, though, he was lying through his teeth. Kaplan had _known_ him, recognized his face. The cultist had always been blessed with a nigh-photographic recall – analysts often thought that his talent had _maybe_ had something to do with his success – so it stood to reason that he would remember Dan.

 _Hopefully, it’s just from the grocery store_.

Somehow, though, Dan did not think that was the case. That wasn’t the way these things seemed to work. Four years ago, the old man had just _looked_ at him the moment he was brought to the secure room – taken one look and grinned like a cat spying an unattended canary. Dan’s own words came into focus next on the page: _No, Mr. Kaplan, that’s usually the point of an interview._

“Trying to fluster you…” Hugh repeated, one eyebrow raised, “And yet you…still want to talk to him.” He shook his head. “Sounds like delayed reaction Stockholm Syndrome, if you ask me.”

That was too close to Dan’s own thoughts and fears for comfort. “Look,” he said, trying to cover that fear, “if I come back talking about selling all my worldly possessions and worshipping the Ninth King, I’ll admit it was a bad idea. And I’ll buy your coffee for a week.”

“Yeah, uh, you manage to get another interview, you make sure to actually….y’know. Find out what in the world the Ninth King’s supposed to _be_ , anyway,” Hugh grumbled as Dan pulled up Finder-Spyder. “Thought cults were supposed to spread the word and all that, not turn into a bunch of clams the second they got caught.” Dan didn’t respond, just staring at the search engine. Hugh hovered around his desk for a few minutes longer before he heaved a sigh, levered himself away from the side of the desk. “So… _what’s_ got you curious in the old nut again?”

Dan shrugged. “Just…a feeling.”

“A feeling.” Hugh repeated, deadpan – and Dan, again, didn’t react, already hunching over the keyboard; just waiting for the other man to _leave_. “Alright, alright, I get the picture.” Hugh turned and headed back towards his office, calling back over his shoulder. “No Dylan McCleen wild-goose-chases this time!”

“…I’m never going to live that down, am I?” Dan muttered to the computer, already typing in _Rachel Kaplan_ one handed, finally giving in to the urge and opening the box of cereal with the other _._ Hugh’s voice drifted back over the other desks, loud over the crunching.

“Nope!”

*

Katie didn’t even say hello when Dan finally returned home at three, the milk in his shirt dried crusty and the half-eaten box of cereal held out like a peace offering. She just raised an eyebrow when she looked up from the pile of dishes she was carrying to the sink.

 “So where did you go this time?”

Dan sighed; kicking the back door shut. “1969,” he said, setting the ignored cereal box onto the table and smelling his fingers before he made a face, shoved his hands into the sink and turned on the water. “Let me tell you, it’s not what it’s been cracked up to be.”

“Ah.” Katie’s voice was tense, almost forced when she continued, though she nudged him out of her way with her hip so she could squirt soap into the water. “Did you figure out who you’re tracking?”

Dan rubbed the back of his head with his still-soapy fingers, trying not to think back to the article, the interviews; Kaplan’s too familiar smirk. “It’s…not always that fast,” he confessed as Katie plunked the dishes into the sink. “But I think I figured out some potentials.”

“Potentials?” There was an air of disappointment in the word, and in the set of Katie’s slender shoulders. Dan felt a pang of guilt at that, taking up a dishtowel mostly as an excuse to have something for his hands to do.

“Yeah,” he said as Katie scrubbed like a woman possessed. “There were a lot of people there, I’m not sure who I’ll be following, but I’ve got a good idea.” He paused, and amended, “Or a couple good ideas.”

He’d looked up all the names he could remember from his interviews, all the pictures on file, even went as far as searching for the child Rachel had been pregnant with at the time. She’d had a little girl, Hannah, all curls and big grey eyes and toothy grins.

He kept hoping it was Rachel or her daughter; mostly thanks to his search results back at the Register. Rachel and her child had been among the first people killed when the police raid went wrong. His feelings seemed to point that way, but he’d been wrong before, with disastrous results.

_Of course, it could also be Jeremy._

He tried not to shudder at the thought, watching Katie finish the dishes and move aimlessly around the kitchen, like she was looking for something else to do. The school bus would be here soon. The school year was winding down, slowly, and…what were they going to do with Zack, when Katie had to work and…he got yanked away again?

Katie finally beckoned for him to follow her into the bedroom, where she began making their still disheveled bad. Dan hesitated as he reached out for the other side of the blanket. The silence went on for too long before he finally blurted, “I saw Jeremy Kaplan.”

“Kaplan?” Katie froze, her knuckles white against the spread. “But he…wasn’t he that cult leader? The…ah.” She thought for a second. “Court of the Ninth Sun King, or something like that?”

“Yes. Well, _Star_ King, but that’s close enough.”

“He’s the one you did that story on.” Dan glanced up just enough to see Katie’s eyes narrowing. He looked away, hurriedly, while she thought out loud. “The one where you came home from the interview and showered for an hour straight because you said he made you feel _slimy_.”

“…Yeah. That was, ah. The anniversary of his arrest.” Katie stopped, staring at the bed without really seeing it while Dan continued. “Which….it went…weird.” His conversation with Hugh kept floating through his head. “He always treated me like he knew me. The first thing he ever said to me was ‘You don’t know me yet, do you?’ I…never understood why.”

And he _still_ didn’t like the implications. Not in the least.

Katie’s hands clenched on the blanket, but she didn’t move again. She looked almost nauseated – Dan didn’t really blame her. Not if she’d reached the same conclusions he had.

“Dan…didn’t they…I think….” Her voice was worried, almost haunted, and Dan couldn’t help but think of Aeden Bennett breaking in all those months ago: the fear he’d felt the whole time trapped in the past, not knowing what was happening in his present. Katie seemed to steel herself and he finally met her eyes; they were bright, brilliant blue. “Dan, they killed people, didn’t they? A lot of people?”

The thought of lying crossed Dan’s mind, briefly, until the look in Katie’s eyes really sank in. He nodded slowly, reluctantly, before he looked away again. “Yes. A lot of people.” Katie followed him around the bed as he took over her job, pulling the covers straight instead of looking at his wife. Bennett had left them both on edge, left Katie uncomfortable in her own home, to the point where they’d even considered putting the house up for sale.

“And it wasn’t…” Dan didn’t interrupt. He let her talk, let her run through the thoughts coursing through her head. “Dan…” She held his gaze for a long second before she bit her lip and looked away.  “It wasn’t ever clean.”

Grainy police evidence photos and police stories about nightmares danced through Dan’s mind and out again, taking the remnant of the brief idea of lying to Katie with them. He nodded again, still reluctantly.

“You’re…yeah, you’re right. It wasn’t.”

“They were _tortured_.”

Dan flopped down on the bed, rubbing at his eyes again. _Yes. That would be the bit I didn’t want to remember. Didn’t want to think about._ He couldn’t think of a way to respond, couldn’t think of a single word to say that would reassure her.

Or himself.

Katie broke the thick silence, slowly.

“I’m scared, Dan. If you’re with them…if you’re _tracking_ them…” Dan scrubbed his hand through his hair, pointedly not looking at Katie, as if horribly fascinated by the pattern on their carpet. The next time Katie spoke, she was right next to him.

“Dan…if you’re tracking _Kaplan_ …what comes next?”

Dan opened his mouth to say something, anything, to take away the worry, reaching out to gather Katie in his arms. She hugged his head to her stomach almost fiercely, and he could feel her trembling.

“I don’t know, Katie.” He finally said, softly. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

They stayed like that for what felt like a long time before Dan felt some of the tension fade, ebbing out of her slowly. He almost gave her a half-hearted smile when he heard her sniff in the dimness of the room.

“Dan?”

“Yeah?”

“Is that milk on your shirt?”

Dan looked down at his shirt, feeling some slight semblance of relief. “Uhm. Yes.”

“Then why is it glowing?”

  



	3. Chapter 3

_1974_

Dan flinched back to awareness to find he was sprawled in a desolate, desert garden, filled with gnarled trees and huge rocks; curled half beneath a withered rosebush. He sat up, brushing its thorny branches away before they could sink into the thin fabric of his t-shirt.

His _new_ t-shirt. Apparently the same unexplained phenomena that made lemons explode didn’t play well with milk.

To his left, a weathered wall rose up from the scattered stones. To his right, the setting sun hung over the horizon, blood red against the black clouds. Its light knifed through the Joshua trees, creating stripes of charnel light and shadows that twisted over the dry, dusty ground. The air was still, stifling, and he could smell the storms that darkened the horizon; electric and threatening.

It all felt about four horsemen away from the Apocalypse.

“There you are! I was beginning to wonder.”

Livia’s voice out of the stillness made him jump. He turned to look at her – and blinked. She was dressed in a shapeless, off-white robe that covered her from head to toe. She caught his look, and glanced down at herself.

“I know, right? I just…I didn’t really want to be wandering around in street clothes…” She waved a hand at the wall. “Not in there, anyway. Not right now.”

“What’s going on?”

Livia shrugged, the robes swallowing most of the movement.

“I’m not sure. I only arrived an hour ago. But I think Rachel – you remember Rachel? – I think she went into labor this morning. Around dawn.”

Dan glanced at the stormy sky and the clearly _setting_ sun, and winced. Livia nodded.

“That about sums it up.” She pulled at her robe again, almost idly. “I overheard some of them talking; apparently he’s been acting weird all day…”

And the puzzle pieces clicked into place.

“…oh.Um. Look, Livia-”

“What’s happening?” A child’s clear voice interrupted him; it sounded out of place in this wasteland, small words stolen away by the threatening air. He scrambled backwards against the wall and behind the tree, listening as Livia pressed in close.

“Your mother…” Kaplan’s voice, answering, was enough to raise gooseflesh up and down Dan’s spine. “She’s having a little boy, remember?”

“Yes…?” The little voice sounded supremely skeptical. “But I don’t get why she’s sleepy all the time…”

“She’s tired from the baby growing inside her,” said a third voice, another man’s voice – deep and rough, one Dan didn’t recognize. “Once your brother comes, she’ll play with you again.”

The speakers sounded so normal that it was a shock when the group finally came into view around the wall – a quartet of figures, dressed in ivory robes: three men and a child, a little girl.

“But why does _Brian_ have to go away?” The girl asked next. Now that Dan could see her, the apprehension slowly creeping up his spine only grew. She still had the baby fat of a healthy kindergartner, rosy cheeks, a tangle of mouse-brown hair and her father’s storm-green eyes. Her small hand clutched her father’s sleeve as she skip-hopped from paving stone to paving stone beside him.

“So that your brother can come whole and hale into the world,” Kaplan explained as Dan slowly began to ease his way along the wall, further out of sight. The man’s voice was patient, but it held an air of impatience, as if he’d explained this to his daughter  before. “You remember? Your brother is like you. He will be very strong, but he will be born very weak...”

It took a moment for things to process, but when Dan’s brain caught up to the rest of him, he could see that the third and last man walked between the others, his head down and his hands bound behind his back. The bound man, Brian, looked up just in time to meet Dan’s eyes.

Dan _had_ seen him before, in the alley behind the grocery store. Brian _had_ been the one ordered to hold him still. He scrambled backwards but not before Brian made a startled noise. Kaplan’s head snapped towards Dan’s hiding place, thoughts flickering too quickly in his seaside stare.

“Dan, _move_.” Livia urged, and Dan opened his mouth to protest – he couldn’t leave her here, he had nowhere to run – before he realized Kaplan was too close for him to speak.

“Though maybe…” Kaplan’s voice grew louder, and Dan’s resolve to stay put faltered just a bit. The cult leader’s voice sounded like a wild cat’s purr. Dan slowly pushed himself to his feet, leaning against the stone, gathering himself for a desperate lunge across the garden. “Maybe, little princess, it doesn’t have to be your Brian.”

_If I can make it a quarter-mile down the road, I could get to the police, I could –_

Kaplan stalked around the corner. Dan sprang into motion – only to be jerked off his feet by Livia’s hand through his collar. He almost turned on her, until he processed the sight of the gun in her hand, its muzzle aimed at his forehead.

“Hello, Daniel...”

 _So much for him just_ _recognizing me from ’69…._

Dan only had a chance to catch Livia’s look of apology from inside her hood before Kaplan fist slammed right into his temple.

Everything went dark.

*

“Dan…”

The voice barely registered through the wild bulls rampaging in his skull. Dan bit back a groan and tried to roll over, only to find out – rather abruptly – that he couldn’t.

“Dan, wake up!”

He managed to get his eyes open. They didn’t quite focus on anything but the dark ceiling above him. He could hear a steady groan in the background, a droning hum that resolved into an almost-Gregorian sounding chant, a wilder voice in rising in descant behind it, but none of the words sank in.

“Dan, thank God. We have to get out of here, _now_.”

His eyes were slowly getting used to the lack-of-light, enough that he could look around the room and actually _see_ things. The room was only a little bigger than a closet, the walls lined with dark wood paneling. His hands were pinned above his head, cuffed tight to a rusting radiator.

Livia hovered over him, expression worried.

“Wha’s goin’ on?” He mumbled, trying to sit up again. The handcuffs around his wrists bit in deeper, as if in protest, and he winced.

“Just listen,” Livia said as she pulled a bobby pin from her hair, ducking to slide the metal into the handcuff’s lock. Dan swallowed the swell of nausea, and tried to obey.

Soon, the counterpoint voice resolved itself into Jeremy Kaplan’s, the wailing, irregular cadence almost hypnotizing.

“And thus,” Jeremy sang or said or cried, reawakening the bulls in Dan’s brain, “Like the lamb provided for Abraham so that he would not slay Isaac, so hath the Lord provided for this fellowship, so that our numbers need not diminish…”

_…oh._

Dan sat up again, regardless of the cacophony. “Livia, hurry…”

“What do you _think_ I’m _doing_?” Livia shot back, fumbling with the cuffs in the semi-dark. “You should have told me he was completely _insane_ or I never would have _grabbed_ you.”

“I didn’t have enough _time_ …” Dan replied, far more muted. Livia’s bark of laughter held no humor in it as the cuffs finally clicked, one wrist falling free. Dan yanked it through the bars of the radiator and pulled himself to his feet.

“Sure, I-”

He never found out what she was going to say, because the door to the room slammed open, and a flood of robed figures swept in. Too many to even consider fighting with. Livia, thinking fast, snagged the now-loose side of the cuffs, offering them to the man in the lead.

Brian.

The big cultist _almost_ looked apologetic as he hauled Dan to his feet, but if he felt any true remorse it certainly didn’t manifest as Dan found himself dragged off his feet and out of the tiny room.

The next time he could see clearly, he was flat on his back, his arms again stretched above him, but this time he could feel all the blood rushing to his head. He was on an inclined table, head-down, and he could no longer see Livia.

There was, however, someone holding both of his hands. He could feel fingers tight around his, and the sensation was disturbing – the gentle brush of skin a dramatic counterpoint to the ache in his head. He tried to lift his head, and caught a glimpse of a bed off to the side. It was surrounded by more robed figures, rushing back and forth, and he suddenly realized what it had to be.

Rachel’s birthing bed.

There was something so horribly _wrong_ about that thought that he can’t help the violent shudder that ran through him, his fingers convulsing around those of his captors. The crowd around the bed parted, for a moment, and Jeremy Kaplan stepped into view, his little girl clinging to one sleeve. Dan swallowed. There was an unholy hunger in the recesses of the other man’s eyes.

“Hello, Daniel.” The cultist said, again, moving calmly. Dan scowled at him as Hannah followed, her big grey-green eyes unafraid. “It’s been a few years…”

_For you, maybe._

“No one calls me Daniel. It’s just Dan.”

The words came out a lot braver than he felt. Kaplan just shook his head as he pried his daughters fingers loose from his arm.

“That just makes it more special, Daniel.” He stopped at the head of the table, reaching out to brush his hand over Dan’s forehead. Dan tried to shy away, but he couldn’t move further than the men clutching his hands would let him. Kaplan just cocked his head to the side, watching his eyes like a wildcat watching some small, defenseless animal. It wasn’t a reassuring comparison. When he spoke again, his voice held a strange sort of wonder.

“I saw you before my princess was born, and now you’re here for my prince. Do you believe in coincidence, Daniel? I sure don’t.”

“It’s not what you think, Kaplan, I-”

Kaplan touched two fingers over Dan’s mouth as if in benediction, reaching for something beneath the table. When he straightened back up, he held the knife in his other hand. 

“It’s exactly what I think,” he purred back, running the knife blade down Dan’s cheek carefully. “You were provided to us for this very moment. You helped my wife _then_ …” The blade slipped down further; the point shifted inward, slicing through the shoulder of Dan’s shirt. The fabric split, and Dan tried to move away from the keen metal pressed to his skin. “…and you’ll help my wife _now_.”

Dan didn’t want to ask, but the words came out anyway. “ _How_ will I-”

The rest of the sentence disappeared when the knife tore skin; dissolved into a wordless hiss of pain. 

*

The hardest part was trying not to scream.

The _second_ hardest was trying not to jerk away. Kaplan seemed content to take his time. All the cuts were shallow and short, but there were a _lot_ of them, and each time the razor-sharp knife seemed to slide a little bit deeper. Dan’s body felt like a mass of pain: his legs from his ankles to his knees, his arms from the elbow down. The sides of his shoulders, the underside of his throat, the center of his chest – they all burned and stung, thin lines, like a road map carved into his flesh.

If he craned his neck – which he didn’t do, because it hurt, a lot – he could see Livia pacing in amongst the chanting cultists, her eyes and her expression growing more and more frantic. He could see her trains of thought: _there’s too many of them_ and _what do we do so we travel out of here_ and _what do I do now_? and, most importantly, _who makes a little girl watch something like this?_

The little girl had, so far, watched the whole thing from the side of the table, her eyes much older than her five-year-old face. Her serene expression was almost frightening, when he could see it. Every now and then, he thought he could see a flicker in her stare, a tiny shiver in her stance.

_Who knows how often she’s had to see something like this?_

The police records said there had been sixteen or seventeen bodies buried in the back gardens, killed over the six years between Jeremy buying the land and…well, tonight. Hannah had to have seen at least one of the murders.

The thought of his son, forced to watch a complete stranger slaughtered in this situation made his stomach clench, and he let his head fall back to the metal surface of the table, let the words escape from his mouth.

“Hannah….little one….” The knife traced down his shin, splitting the skin in a burst of fire-hot pain that glowed red behind his eyelids. Dan gasped; Kaplan just chuckled, low and malevolent in his throat.

“I have a l-little boy,” Dan added, pulling against the fingers threaded through his. “C-can I tell you? Will you listen?” Big grey-green eyes flickered to Kaplan; Jeremy didn’t say anything one way or the other, so Dan went on. “He’s a l-little older than y-you, h-he’s eight…”

“That’s three years older,” Hannah said matter-of-factly. Dan chuckled weakly, more startled than anything.

“Y-yeah, that’s right. So h-he’s in school. And s-sometimes, s-sometimes at school his, his…his friends…” Heat lanced down his arm, and his fingers went numb under the sensation. The next words came out rushed together and shuddery. “His f-friends try t-to get him to do things h-he’s not supposed to do. S-sometimes h-he chooses to go along and do the b-bad things, and s-sometimes he ch-chooses not t-to, b-but…”

Kaplan had gone still for a moment. Dan’s eyes flickered up toward him to find the cult-leader looking at him, as impassive as if Dan was a bug. Hannah stood still, next to him, but she seemed to be listening and her eyes were less certain than they had been before. Jeremy twitched the knife a little deeper into Dan’s arm, and his daughter bit down on her lip, deep in thought as Dan choked back a whine.

 “Hannah,” he resumed, voice shaking, thick with the screams he was desperately trying to hold back, “He _c-chooses. T-this_ doesn’t h-have to be you. It doesn’t _ever_ h-have t-to be you. You can choo-”

And then the knife was in his mouth, the coppery tang of his own blood thick and nauseating. The flat of the blade pressed against the corners of his lips, and if he shifted even the tiniest bit he could feel the serrated edge pressing down; a hard, painful promise touching the surface of his tongue. He swallowed, and his heartbeat in the hollow of his throat flared, wild and fierce, a feral sensation exacerbated by the voice hissing in his ear.

“I think that’s enough, Daniel. I have no problem with letting your drown in your own blood. “

He could hear his own heartbeat in his skull, throbbing in time with every single slice and gash and cut, the blood drying in flakes on the still-intact skin. He could feel bruises on his forehead from where Jeremy had clocked him, but the pain was a secondary sensation under all the rest.

“There’s a reason for this, you know…” Jeremy’s voice was a low growl, his breath brushing against Dan’s skin. “A reason and a ritual, and it has a fixed end.”

“Daddy-”

The knife blade withdrew, slowly, the metal warm against his lips. He tried to lick them, felt the ache return as a hand was placed over his eyes; warm and calloused and almost gentle as fingertips caressed his sweat-and-blood slicked temple. He swallowed again against the pain, sucking in a harsh breath as the hand tipped his head back.

“I’ll be done in a minute, baby,” Kaplan’s words were ghost-soft; soothing and fatherly – and then he raised his voice. “The Star King waits in mortal form to be freed, to be cut free from his earthly chains…”

The rest of the followers, the ring around the table, fell silent at the words. Dan shifted his head against the hand holding him down, teeth sunk deep in his lip, straining to listen, to hear anything other than the cultist’s mad-lion roar.

“We show today, as one, our faithfulness to our coming King.”

“Please, please don’t, please…” The words came out against his will, and they hurt almost as much as everything else did. He didn’t even know who he was begging – Kaplan, to stop? Rachel, to wake up and do something? Livia, who he couldn’t see and couldn’t hear but who he _knew_ was here? Or….the ones who put him here in the first place, jerked his chain, led him ‘round and ‘round in circles to fix everyone’s lives while his own flashed before his eyes on the inside of a madman’s palm.

“Please _what_?” Jeremy hissed, soft and smooth as his fingers tightened, the hand with the knife tracing lazy curlicues across Dan’s chest. Dan couldn’t hold back the ragged little gasp, for all he tried.

“Pl-please…d-don’t…don’t make her w-watch this.” He sucked in another breath, praying that his instincts were correct, that he’d been sent to help Hannah and not someone else, hoping that she was _listening_. ”D-don’t do this t-to your d-daughter.”

“I’m not doing anything _to_ my daughter. I’m doing this _for_ her.” The fire-edged steel lifted from his skin, the hand pressing his head down even harder against the polished wood of the table. He could feel Kaplan moving, knew the knife was being raised, heard Hannah’s voice again –

“Daddy! _No-_ ”

Lights flashed behind his eyelids and everything went silent.


	4. Chapter 4

“Katie?”

Dan’s voice rasped; his dry tongue made his mouth feel like something had crawled into his throat and died there. His hand shook against the pay phone, the quarters dug from the tattered remains of his jeans imprinting dead presidents on his fingers. Everything seemed fuzzy around the edges; distant, including Katie’s voice in his ear.

“Oh my God, Dan, are you alright?”

There was relief in her voice, interwoven with a tint of relief. Dan looked down at his torn arm, his bloody chest and his destroyed jeans, and tried not to hiss at the pain that tiny little movement sent spiraling through him.

 “I…I don’t think so.”

“Where are you?” Katie’s voice went all-business, the worry and relief vanishing, hidden beneath her strong, determined tone.

“I don’t know,” Dan confessed. When the present had returned, just a few minutes ago, he’d been laying on his back on the packed sand, scrubby tree branches spread out overhead like reaching arms. He’d thrashed against the air as if it was the hands still holding him down before he’d grasped what happened.

It was dusk. He could see the moon rising out over the bay, leaving a path of silver light on the calm sea, soothing when compared to the frenetic lights of the city. It had taken an unfair amount of effort to get to the payphone. “I’m not…not sure.”

“…not sure?”

“I can’t…” Thinking was hard. Rolling over and falling asleep sounded a lot more manageable. “I’m not in the city, I’m on the beach, but…” Beyond that…

Katie’s voice changed again, the next time she spoke.

“Dan, don’t hang up. I’m going to call Jack, he can…”

“Track the phone?” Dan offered weakly. He could hear Katie’s soft bark of laughter through the ringing in his ears and the chirping of the crickets.

“Glad to see you’re as sharp as ever.”

“Hurry, Katie.”

“Oh, don’t worry about _that_ , Dan,” Katie said, and in the background he could hear Zack’s voice, tone questioning though Dan couldn’t hear his words. “I _am_.

Twenty minutes later, the sound of screeching brakes filled the air, scaring the crickets into silence. Dan swallowed as he blinked out into the darkness, watching the glow of headlights glaring into the scrub, and flashlight beams play along the rocks.

“Dan?” Jack’s voice hit his ears first, loud over the low rush of the constant waves. “Dan, where are you?”

“I’m-” his voice cracked when he raised it, and he shivered against the evening chill as the flashlights converged on him, the sound of shifting gravel coming closer and closer. “I’m r-right here.”

One of the beams hit his face and he held his hand up to block the brilliant light. His skin was darker than it should have been, smeared and sticky, and as the spots faded from his eyes and he could _see_ his wife and his brother, he tried not to react to their open, dismayed stares.

“It’s…a l-long story,” he murmured, trying – and utterly failing – to stand under his own power. His legs throbbed at the mere _idea_ of standing, but there was no way he was going to let them try to _carry_ him out. He kept his hand up until Jack took it, hauling him upright. His knees almost buckled at that simple motion.

Jack caught him before he could fall. “Easy there,” he said as Katie caught his other arm, ignoring the red Dan left behind on her shirt. “You can tell us at the hospital.”

Dan wasn’t much help on the way to the car. The world kept spinning around him, the sky and the ground switching places, and he was glad that it was so dark. He didn’t want to look at how much blood had soaked into his clothes. It was a sign of just how disconnected he was that he stalled when he got to the car, pulling against their leading arms.

“…the Mustang?” Jack, I…”

“Shut up and get in the car.”

He didn’t have the strength to argue.

Once they hit the city proper, the Mustang took the corners so quickly that Dan – in his hazy, disconnected blur of pain – would not have been surprised if it had risen on two tires each and every time.

The seats were starting to turn an odd shade of pinkish red beneath his legs, but Katie’s lap was warm; her exercise sweats soft against his lacerated skin. Dan clung to her and tried very hard not to whine as the traffic lights and street lights spun in his eyes. He could hear her and Jack talking above his head, their voices tight with stress, but the numbness and pain in alternating waves fuzzed their voices like a badly tuned radio.

An abrupt stop in a fresh squeal of breaks jolted him back awake, and he couldn’t swallow the yelp that sprang from his lips. Katie murmured something low; her hand – red-tinged and sticky – brushed his jaw soothingly.

“Almost there,” he heard Jack say, and the back door jerked open. “Sorry, man…”

“Sor-”

The rest of the questioning word dissolved into a gagging gasp of pain when Jack grabbed his shoulder and pulled him out of the car. His brother held him up on one side, his wife on the other, and their staggering shamble through the parking lot was a blur. His eyes only focused on the glass in the door, and his bloody face.

_I look like something out of a horror movie…_

When they made it through the big double doors, there was an explosion of movement around them as emergency room security converged on them. Jack flashed his badge and blurted something Dan couldn’t comprehend through the sudden ringing in his ears. 

“Jack?” His voice sounded loud in his ears, and the room swam again. Jack looked back over just as Dan’s knees gave out.

*

He never hit the floor; they caught him first, but he was already out.

He didn’t hear the doctors leaning over him, didn’t see Katie’s worried faces, or Jack’s earnest explanations.

He just slept, but his sleep was shallow, uneasy; filled with knife blades and hellish skies and pain.

*

“It could have been worse.” Jack’s words, floating through his head, were the first that processed clearly in what felt like several days. “At least it’s only sixty-four…”

Dan’s eyes fluttered open. Everything felt distant. There was a tugging sensation on his arms, his shins, his face, but it held no pain. He lifted his hand to look, and was not surprised to find his arm wrapped in bandages clear to his elbow.

“Hnh?”

Jack sprawled in Katie’s vacated chair, feet over one armrest, his shoulders against the other.

 “Sixty-four stitches.” He clarified, waving at Dan’s bandaged arm. Dan looked at it again, flexed his fingers. He could still clench his hand in a fist, but it ached the whole time.

“…ow?”

“Yeah? Well, whoever did that knew what they were doing.” Jack rubbed his hand over his eyes. “Missed the arteries, didn’t cut any tendons…you lost a lot of blood, but….” Dan thought back to his bloody reflection in the windows and reached up to touch his jaw. His fingers brushed against another long bandage. Jack watched him, head tilted to the side.

“Like I said. It could have been a lot worse.”

Dan’s hand shifted, almost of its own accord, to touch the hollow of his throat. The skin was whole, but he could almost feel the razor edge of the knife pressed there, almost still taste the salt-tang of his own blood. He swallowed hard.

“I’m…sorry about the car.”

Jack snorted. “Don’t worry. I had to take the thing in to the body shop anyways; the LoJack’s not working. Might as well get it cleaned at the same time…” He faltered under Dan’s stare. “What? You have to test it every now and then…anyways. What _happened_ to you? I told them it was hush hush and all under investigation, which was a big, _big_ lie, so I don’t suppose you can tell me what it _really_ was?”

“Actually…yeah. I can.” Dan laughed, just a bit, letting his hand drop back to the bed at his brother’s double-take. “I can tell _you_ , but anyone else…”

“Ah.” Jack shook his head. “I kinda thought it’d be something like that.” He paused for a second, and then looked back at Dan. “So…?”

“I was very nearly one of Jeremy Kaplan’s sacrificial lambs.” He tried to keep his words light, but from the stunned horror on Jack’s face he didn’t entirely succeed.

“…oh wow.” Jack finally said. “ _Wow._ Really?”

Dan nodded. “Yeah, really, and let me tell you he’s about as charming back then as he is now.” He rubbed his finger across one of the bandages up his arm, pushing the memory of Kaplan leaning over him and _gently_ sliding the knife across his forearm out of his head.

“You wrote an article on him, didn’t you?” Jack asked. “Back in 2006, right? It was about him spending, like…twenty-five years in prison. People made that big deal about it, ‘cuz it was like a follow-up to Dad’s series...”

Dan blinked. Kaplan had spent _thirty_ years in jail, hadn’t he? He opened his mouth to correct his brother, and the rest of Jack’s words caught up with his befuddled brain.

 _“Dad’s_ series?”

Frank Vassar _would_ have been the type to cover a cult if given a chance, before he’d disappeared out of their lives all those years ago, but Dan had gone over _all_ the research and _all_ past articles. He would have found anything his father had written in his search.

 _Except you went back and kept Kaplan from killing someone that night._ His mind shied away from the incidentals – like how closely _he_ had come to _being_ that someone. _If there was no screaming, there was no raid. If there was no raid…_

“Yes?” Jack said, giving Dan a strange look. “He wrote, like. Five articles? Started in ’76 or somethin’. You always said it was one of the things that made you follow in his footsteps…” Blue eyes narrowed. Jack reached out to touch Dan’s forehead gingerly. “Are you sure they didn’t hit your head?”

C _an I change my own past that much?_ He could still remember the conversation with Jack that he’d erased on accident, even though it had never happened for Jack. He pushed away the hand.

“I think….it might be one of _those_ things.” He struggled a little more upright, elbowing a pillow out of his way. “Can you get me a laptop? They should have a lending library or something here…”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Jack protested. “I mean…” Dan gave him a _look_. His older brother sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

 

*

“So, Jack, what do _you_ know about the Court of the Ninth Star King?”

Dan typed the name into Finder Spyder one handed, absently rubbing the bandages up his arm. Jack, successful in his laptop search, again sprawled in the chair next to the bed, waiting for Katie to return.

Jack shrugged. “What’s there to know?”

“Humor me.” Dan eyed him until Jack threw up his hands in exasperated surrender.

“Alright, um. Let me think. It started in, like. 1970…”

Jack’s voice was a reassuring tether while Dan paged through article after article. There were far more stories about the Kaplans and the Court this time around, probably because there had been no raid on that summer night in 1974. Instead, the Court carried on; gaining members by the dozen while keeping its core membership in place.

_Congratulations, you made it bigger. _

The thought made his arm twinge. He flexed his fingers, shook off the thought. Jack kept talking.

“So, like…I guess in ’78, Brian turned traitor.”  
  
The words grabbed Dan’s attention from his latest article. He looked up, startled.

“Brian? Brian Fleming?”

Things kept coming back to Fleming, but Dan still didn’t have that _feeling_ associated with him, that instinct of _rightness_ that Hannah caused.

_Maybe your instincts are screwed up on this one._

Jack shrugged again. “Yeah. Kaplan’s right hand man. He wrote a book, after. Really interesting stuff. He talks abut sneaking people out of the compound before they were in too deep, claims he started _that_ in 1974…the house is still there and everything. People keep buying it and selling it, but nothing’s managed to start up there…too many bad associations.”

The last article Dan looked at claimed the core membership included the man whose place Dan had taken on the table, that he had continued Kaplan, even though he had shown no qualms about ordering his death. It hadn’t seemed to make _sense_. Now, though, the puzzle piece clicked into place.

_He stayed to get other people out._

“But anyways. I guess Fleming got tired of savin’ them in ones and twos, because a month after Jonestown, he went to the F.B.I. Told them that he’d pass on information, let them know if Kaplan planned anything illegal. They offered to get him out immediately, but I guess his wife refused to come at first…”

 _No wonder he stayed._  
  
“So the Bureau worked with him for awhile, I guess. Took them three years, but they finally took out the whole compound.” Jack thought for a second as Dan stared at the computer screen, not really seeing the search results he was starting at. He added, begrudgingly, no love lost between police and the Feds, “It’s one of the best raids they ever did; I hear they still teach recruits about it at the Academy. Only one person died, and she was friendly fire from the cultists.”

_One person._

One was a vast improvement on the previous numbers, but Dan still had to ask, still had a suspicion that he knew exactly what Jack was about to say. “One person?”

Jack looked pained. That was all the confirmation Dan needed, even before Jack said the words.

“Yeah. Kaplan’s eleven year old daughter.”

*

Jack left shortly after that cheery piece of news, chased out by the nurse. He took the laptop with him on the young, pushy lady’s insistence that Dan _needed_ his rest. He had to make do with the television playing softly in the corner, local news and weather and badly made commercials.

Katie finally returned after seeing Zack safely to the babysitter’s; interrupting the monotony that settled after the nurses came in and kicked Jack out. Her hand was warm in his, and he kept tightening his fingers, just to reassure himself that she was there. Every now and then, her grip called to mind the people holding him down, but every time his mind tried to tread that path, he fixed his eyes on her tired face, and the feeling faded.

He wanted to take that worry away, but he didn’t quite know how to do that. Not with the worry still sunk deep in _his_ gut.

_You have to talk._

“You know I’m going back, right?” Dan’s words turned Katie’s frown into an all-out scowl.

“Yeah, I know, but I don’t _want_ you to!” She snapped back, eyes narrowing. Dan winced, kept himself from even looking at his bandages.

“I know you don’t want me to go. _I_ don’t want to go. But…that’s not how it works. You should know that by now.” Katie’s fingers tightened and Dan fought the urge to jerk away; stared at her resolutely so he wouldn’t see bloody light and flashing blades. “I’m not _done_ yet.”

She met his eyes, glare fierce, and he held it with all the confidence he could muster. Some of the tension faded from Katie’s shoulders after a moment. The flicker of firelight at the corners of Dan’s eyes faded with it. He offered her a tired smile.

“I’ll come back when I’m done. I always do, don’t I?”

“Yeah.” Katie agreed, running her hand through her hair. “You said…Livia said the trips would get longer and longer?”

_This is not a good time for this conversation._

Dan inhaled slowly, blew out his breath in a long sigh. “…yeah. Yeah, she did.”

“I don’t think that’s started yet.” Katie sniffed, rubbing her hand across her nose. “For what that’s worth. They’ve all been…about the same as always.” She offered him a watery smile. “You’re not getting away from me that easily this time.”

Dan crooked a smile at her. Katie looked like she was about to say something else when the television flashed bright, drawing both of their attentions. Huge words appeared on the screen: “JEREMY KAPLAN – ESCAPED?”

“…what on _earth…_?” Dan stared. Katie dove for the remote, turning the volume up quickly as her coworker onscreen frowned, his expression appropriately grave and miles away from the laughing man who pulled him out of poker games.

“In a bizarre turn of events, Jeremy Kaplan – San Francisco’s famed cult mastermind – appears to have escaped during a routine check-up.” Dan’s stomach clenched; his fingers tightened around the bed’s railing. Kaplan’s picture – closer to how he’d looked when Dan had interviewed him – blinked onto the screen. The reporter went on.

“Kaplan, arrested in 1981, is serving three consecutive life sentences for multiple murders in San Francisco and the surrounding areas. He is believed unarmed, but should still be considered dangerous. The police are asking anyone with information on Kaplan’s whereabouts to call this special tips hotline.” The number spun onto the screen, making Dan’s head swim.  

“Local crime buffs will remember that Kaplan had a compound to the north of the city that still stands today. We can’t help but speculate that maybe the police will focus their search on those areas… We’ll have more on this story after the break.”

Katie looked at him as the special-report music faded away to commercials again, though the number continued to tick along across the top of the screen.

The room suddenly felt very cold. Dan shivered, drawing the blanket closer to him.

Katie’s voice, when she finally spoke, was tight. “Tell me again that you’re going to be alright?”

He told her, more than once, and she slid up the bed to sit next to him when the commercials ended, arms wrapped carefully around him, reassuring with her warmth…

But even though she stayed with him until he drifted back off into an uneasy sleep, he couldn’t make _himself_ believe it.


	5. Chapter 5

_1980_

It was dark, black as pitch, and every bone in Dan’s body _screamed_. He barely managed to not let that scream come out of his mouth as he caught himself on the wall; barely managed not to fall flat on his scraped-up face. The hospital room had been brightly lit. Here, wherever _here_ was, he couldn’t even see his bandaged hand in front of his face.

The building felt familiar, despite the darkness. The air was stifling, heavy and laden with the scent of incense and gunpowder. The stone floor beneath his bare feet was warm, worn smooth by constant traffic. He turned a corner, and found himself staring at the little room he’d been imprisoned in last trip. The recognition made his stomach twist in a knot, though he’d already suspected as much.

Dan hobbled down the hall, one hand on the paneled wall, listening to the steady, even sounds of many, many people breathing. He’d arrived in the compound’s dormitory, which meant there were probably some forty-odd people in this wing.

Fortunately, they were all asleep. Dan crept past, feeling his heart pounding in his ears. If he was in the compound, he half-knew why he was here.

Eleven year old Hannah Kaplan.

According to Jack, the police reports and the F.B.I’s internal analysis of the raid, the girl had been out of bed when the F.B.I. came in the door. Everything _else_ had gone according to plan – but Hannah had ended up in front of her father’s gun.

No child deserved that. Dan shuffled through the strange building as quietly and as quickly as he could. Even the simple act of walking still _hurt_ , pain spiking through his legs and arms, but this…

_This is more important._

He soon came to a lower level: a shallow, wide-open living area, lit by low burning candles. His eyes adjusted slowly as he eased himself down the steps. A newspaper rested on the back of one couch. He picked it up and glanced at the date.

_August 27, 1980._

The night of the F.B.I. raid.

He tensed at motion in the corner of his eyes, started to turn, and -

“Dan!”

Livia’s voice came as a loud, relieved whisper in the silence. He barely kept himself upright when she practically tackled him, regardless of the bandages and the dead hush around them. She was trembling. He could feel it in her arms around him, her fingers when she brushed them down his cheek. “Dan, I thought…I thought he _killed_ you.”

“Two seconds later and he would have.” He could still feel the razor edge against his jugular vein, the bone-deep certainty that he was going to die, bleed out thirty years from home. Livia’s fingers brushed the knick in his neck, and he pulled away from the touch.

“Sorry.” Livia looked around the room; Dan was sure he could see tears shining in her eyes, bright in the golden glow of the candles, but when she whispered again her voice was all business. “Why are we here?”

“Well, for starters, Brian turned on Jeremy.”

Livia made a scoffing noise low in her throat. “I don’t blame him.” She moved away, looking around the living room. The table he’d been strapped to had been removed, but Dan could remember exactly where it had been placed, remember the way the ceiling looked above him. Livia seemed to be avoiding that section of the room too.

“Brian stayed in the Court for _years,_ actually.”

“Even after Jeremy tried to kill him? That’s loyalty…”

Dan chuckled, dryly. “Not quite. He was working with the F.B.I. the whole time, feeding them information…”

Livia looked up from going through a pile of magazines. “But you don’t think that’s why we’re here.”

“No,” Dan agreed. “I think we’re here for Hannah.”

“Kaplan’s little girl?” Livia set the last magazine down, brushing her long hair behind her ear.

“Yeah, she…ah.” Dan waved a hand in the general direction of the front door. “The F.B.I.’s going to bust in here any minute, and she’s going to get killed almost after the fact. It might not be her, though; it’s just a…hunch.”

“What did I tell you?” Livia chided, “ _Trust_ your instincts. _Go_ with your hunches.” She ghosted across the room, opening a wood-paneled door to peer inside. Dan shifted towards the other side of that door, reaching out to brush his fingers over a framed piece of newspaper.

 _Chivalry is Not Dead – Tradition and the Court of the Ninth Star King_ read the headline. Under that, _by Frank Vassar_.

He still didn’t remember his father writing about the Court. He was about to take the framed article off the wall when something creaked, loudly.

“ _What was that?_ ”

Livia pointed, one hand drawing Dan a little closer to the wall. Dan followed her finger. Hannah Kaplan was galloping down the hall; a little boy on her back, his arms wrapped around her shoulders as he grinned in obvious delight. Hannah skidded to a stop at the top of the stairs with a low neighing noise, and hopped down them two at a time, landing with a _thump_ of feet and the little boy’s muted giggle.

“Shhhhh, Jerry, you’re going to get us _caught_ ,” she hissed at the little boy, who clamped a hand over his own mouth. “And then you won’t get cocoa for a week.”

Dan drew a little further back, going so far as to step into the half-open closet frowning thoughtfully. None of the articles had said anything about a second child. He was about to mention that fact to Livia when two things happened simultaneously.

Brilliant floodlights blazed through the windows – and Hannah looked up and saw _them_ standing there.

Dan was moving before he could think, one hand over the girl’s mouth as a loud voice blared out, blocking the rest of the cry that managed to escape Hannah’s lips.

“ _Jeremy Kaplan, this is the Federal Bureau of Investigations…_ ”

Livia was on his heels. She caught the little boy as he dropped from Hannah’s shoulders, hauling him off his feet as Dan pushed the girl carefully into the closet and scrambled in behind her. Livia pulled the door closed just as the nearest dormitory door slammed open.   

Dan fell back against the wall, body throbbing from the bursts of motion. Two days in the hospital, if would seem, hadn’t been sufficient to heal what Kaplan had done. Livia flashed him a concerned look as she sat holding the little boy, who thrashed against her grip.

“I’ll…I’ll be alright…” He panted, leaning his head back against the wall. Everything _burned_ , though, as he dug his cell phone from the pocket of the pajama pants he’d pulled on when the headache flared behind his eyes, jerked him out of his sleep.

Hannah squirmed out from under his arm, her confused expression visible in the light creeping beneath the door and from the phone. “Daniel?”

 Dan felt his blood run cold as he froze against the door, inexplicably frightened by this little girl who knew his name. Hannah blinked wide eyes at him.

“But…why aren’t you….didn’t….I thought Daddy _killed_ you.”

“You….remember me.” The words took a lot of effort. Dan stayed leaning back against the door. He could hear footsteps outside, in the living room. Footsteps, a lot of shouting. Angry shouting, scared shouting. The light from beneath the door kept shifting, changing as people ran in front of the spotlights. He held his breath, hunkering down as best he could, one arm around Hannah’s narrow shoulders.

“I remember everything,” the girl said, her voice older than it should have been. “Daddy says it’s a sign that I’m just like he is. He says it means that if the King doesn’t come before Daddy moves on, I have to take his place.”

Livia looked at Dan, one eyebrow raised, as he winced.

“You know, you do have a choice…” He pointed out, unwilling to end the conversation right there, despite the raised voices just on the other side of the door. Hannah laughed. It, too, was an old sound.

“You told me that before. Remember? Back when Jerry was being born.  You said I had a choice. And then…then you begged.” Hannah’s voice went suddenly very, very small. “I…I couldn’t look. I looked away. And Daddy…he told us all he killed you. And that that was how Jerry was born OK.”

The little boy in Livia’s arms blinked wide green eyes open at the sound of his name. Hannah gave him a little smile before she looked back at Dan.

“He said you were the one we’d been waiting for,” Hannah added, her voice becoming a little more firm. “That everything was going to get better now.” She cocked her head, looking at him sideways. “I guess this explains why it wasn’t…”

“If you were waiting for Dan,” Livia pointed out, voice confused, “Why did your dad try to kill him?”

“Because the Tenth Star King can’t be born while he’s still in a mortal vessel.”

Dan wasn’t sure which was worse – the fact that an eleven year old girl was discussing his death as if it _could_ have been a good thing, or that she was talking about it with a completely straight face. He blinked in the darkness, feeling that nervousness in his gut twinge again. All of the articles about what the Court believed had appeared _after_ his would-be sacrifice and his disappearance. The idea made his hands shake, just a bit, when he asked.

“Your dad…thought _I_ was the Ninth Star King?”

“Daddy said you…ascended?” She sounded as if she was tasting the word for the first time, and Dan made a sound of assent, “And that’s why there was no body, and now all we had to do was wait. That the Tenth would find us and everything would be…perfect.”

Something crashed out in the living room, loud; glass shattering. Hannah jumped, and Dan tried to regain mental equilibrium. It was harder than he would have anticipated.

 _Everything that’s happened since 1974 has been about me?_ Livia kept staring at him, and he tried to give her a reassuring smile. Given her expression, it left much to be desired.

“What do you think is going on out there?” He asked softly, changing the subject as Livia continued to rock the little boy in her arms, without once moving her hand from his mouth. Hannah shrugged, moving Dan’s arm in the process. He tried not to whimper at the sudden sharp pain.  
  
“I…I don’t know. Daddy’s been watching a lot of TV lately. He won’t stop talking about Jonestown. He kept saying that Mister Jones had some good ideas…” Hannah frowned. “I don’t think they were very good ideas at all, but…” she shrugged again, and Dan hurriedly pulled his arm away. 

The girl’s eyes lit on the bandages, the bright white almost glowing in the dimness of the closet. “You…you said you’re not the Ninth King, so…are you an angel?” she asked, out of the blue, and Dan froze. Jerry stilled in Livia’s arms as they both listened for Dan’s answer.

“Why,” Dan spoke carefully, “why would you say that?”

“Because that’s where Daddy cut you.” Hannah replied, matter-of-fact, reaching out and touching one of the bandages. Her fingers tapped against his jaw too. “And there…and-”

Gunfire sounded beyond the door, loud and sharp in the darkness. They all jumped, and Hannah started to scramble to her feet. His hand closed tight around her wrist.

“Stay put.”

“But…”

“Your dad’s alright. And I’m not the one you were waiting for. I’m not an angel,” Dan hurried to say, as Hannah tugged against his grip and Jerry turned interested eyes on him as well. “I’m…” 

Hannah was a smart girl, but she was still just a child. Even if she was to tell anyone what she’d been told, no one would believe her, and _he_ would be long-gone. He pulled her back down to sit next to him, and drew in a deep breath.

“I’m from the future.”

“….the future?” Jerry breathed out as Livia moved her hand, glaring daggers at Dan. But Dan barreled on, talking over the sounds from outside.

“I’m from May of two thousand and _eight_.” Jerry’s eyes went wider, his jaw falling open. “I travel to help people, I watch _over_ people, so I’m _sort_ of like an angel, but…” He waved a hand at his bandages. “I’m human, just like you. I can promise you, though, in the future, nobody has to kill people just so other people can be born.” 

Hannah shrank in on herself a bit. “Why are you watching over us? We’re not…we’re not good. Daddy’s bad and he’s made us bad, and…”

Another gunshot. 

This one tore through the closet door, leaving a circle of splinters and a halo of light streaming through the hole it left behind. If Hannah had still been standing, it would have hit her in the forehead. Dan quashed the swell of nausea as Hannah buried her head against his chest.

“You have a _choice_ ,” Livia chimed in, firmly, reaching out to brush sawdust from the messy curls of Hannah’s hair. “Your dad can’t _make_ you bad. Just remember that.”

“ _Please_ remember that,” Dan added. Behind him, the door shifted, like someone was pulling on the doorknob. He reached up to grab the knob, hold the door shut tight for as long as he could, feeling the familiar pressure rising inside his skull. 

“Just remember, I’m watching out-”

The door slamming open was the last thing he saw before the light took him back to his life.


	6. Chapter 6

“-for you.”

The words still came out after the fact, loud in the stillness. Dan blinked at the sudden brightness – it felt like mid-morning – and looked down to see a duck at his feet. It quacked at him, loudly, clearly expecting a handout.

“Oh, quack yourself.”

Disgruntled, the duck waddled off. Dan dug for his cell phone, already looking around. Fortunately, this time it was easy to recognize where he was.

*

  
“Jack?”

“Dan! Where _are_ you?”

 “Golden Gate Park. Can you….”

“On my way.”

*

Jack picked him up in a police cruiser that smelled strongly of coffee and cigarettes, and he had to help Dan into the seat. The painkillers Dan had taken before bed were _definitely_ wearing off.  Every motion sent stabbing, burning pains through each limb, and his jaw and throat were starting to throb. He tried to keep his eyes on the dashboard instead of the scenery zooming by. It was easier on his stomach that way.

Jack pulled into the hospital parking lot, shoved the car into park, and turned to look at Dan, eyebrows raised.

“How many more times is this gonna happen this week?”

“I don’t know. I won’t know until I get a chance to look at some stuff.”

It certainly didn’t _feel_ done yet.

The hospital staff was _furious_. There was no other way to describe it. They didn’t say anything to _him_ as Jack helped him back into his bed (after the doctor checked, cleaned and re-bandaged his wounds), but he could see them in the hallway, arguing with each other. He could see it in the nurses’ eyes when they came in to check his blood pressure and give him his new painkillers. The nurse who did _that_ even stuck around to make sure he’d swallowed them.

Dan tried not to glare at the implication.

_Yes, I survived a guy planning to skin me just so I could escape and sell my painkillers two by two. Excellent plan._

Jack finally banished the irate hospital denizens and came back into the room, hands in his pockets. “I texted Katie. She’ll be in on her lunch break.”

The painkillers were making him sleepy again, but he nodded, rubbing his eyes. He would like to sleep, but…he’d rather have this entire thing _done_ first. Somehow.

“Jack, I have a question.”

“Shoot.”

“On the news the other night…” The timing was odd, too coincidental. He hadn’t put two and two together until they were halfway back to the hospital and his own words floated back to him out of the past.

_I’m from May two-thousand and eight…_

“Which Jeremy Kaplan escaped? Was it Jeremy Kaplan, _Senior_ or Jeremy Kaplan, _Junior_?”

Jack paced the hospital room, frowning out the door before he answered. “Is this another one of those…things?”

Dan nodded.

Jack sighed.

“It was Jeremy Kaplan, _Senior_. They let an eighty year old man escape during a checkup. Now how embarrassing is that?” He shook his head, pacing back towards the bed.

Dan’s hand, absently, wandered up to touch his throat. Jack caught the hand, pulled it away, and pressed it firmly back to the covers.

“Stop that. Don’t dwell.”

Dan obeyed for a second before he pulled the covers off again, swinging his feet over the edge of the mattress. “Alright, alright, I’m not dwelling. But I need you to help me get out of here.”

Jack looked at him, wide-eyed. “Whoa, wait, what? Why? I _just_ got you back in here, got you past all those doctors, and-”

“Because, Jack. I’m not done with the Kaplans yet. I’ll just leave again. And then you’ll have to get me back in here, _again_.”

“…I was afraid you were going to say that.”

*

They signed the twenty reams of required paperwork, listened to the lectures and the instructions about the antibiotics and how often to change the bandages, and what, exactly, Dan was allowed to do and not do. Katie was still at work, though Jack texted again to let her know _exactly_ what her husband was doing.

Her return text was not very complimentary towards their intelligence. Dan surreptitiously deleted it before Jack climbed into the cruiser.

And then he drove them home.

“…Jack?” Dan ventured, three minutes later.

“Mmm?”

“Why are you driving a cruiser?”

“…remember how I told you the Mustang was in the shop? Well, you’re not going to believe this, but…”

“Your car got stolen from the garage?”

“My car got stolen from the garage.”

Dan leaned back in the seat, rubbing his hand over his eyes. “And I have you playing taxi. I’m _really_ sorry…”

Jack waved Dan’s apology off. “I wouldn’t be allowed to actively look for it anyways. I’m too ‘personally involved.’” He took his hands off the dash to make the air-quotes and everything. Dan winced.

_At least it explains why he’s being helpful. He’s bored and he wants to be distracted._

“I’m-”

“If you say I’m sorry one more time, injured or not, I’m going to have to punch you.”

Dan shut his mouth, and stayed quiet the rest of the ride home.

*

“So…did Kaplan have help getting out?” Dan asked once they were safely in the house. He’d been banished to the couch with his laptop while Jack dug around in the kitchen, making far more noise than was, perhaps, necessary. “Could it have been Junior? Theoretically?”

“I guess theoretically,” Jack called back, slamming a cabinet door closed. “Junior hasn’t been seen since 2005, since he had _his_ little jailbreak.” He paused, chewing on his lip thoughtfully. “That would give him prior experience in it, though…”

Dan looked up from the computer and his latest search. “Jerry Kaplan was in jail?”

Jack reappeared in the kitchen hall, carrying a bowl of tortilla chips and a pair of beer bottles. He nodded as he flopped down on the chair opposite from Dan, putting his feet on the coffee table.

“Yeah, escaped in 2005, shows up on America’s Most Wanted like once a year, where have you been?”

Dan pinned Jack with a _look_.

Jack just met his gaze. “What?”

“Look, I told you what I do, right? I go back and I _fix stuff_. When I fix it, things _change_. When this all started? Kaplan went down in ‘74.” Jack whistled, eyebrows climbing towards his hair. “So humor me. Assume I don’t know anything about the case after…oh, I don’t know. 1981.”

“Assume you know nothing?” Jack teased, “That should be pretty easy.”

“Very funny.”

“Sorry.” Jack didn’t look it in the least, but he set his chips down on the cushion next to him, staring at the ceiling. “So, after the F.B.I. took down Kaplan – and sentenced him to about a billion years in jail - the kids that the Court had all got split up, after; put in foster homes and adopted and stuff. Some of the kids where Jerry was placed found out who his daddy was and started raggin’ on him about it. He, uh, took a gun to school.”

He sighed, cracking open the top of his beer and outright ignoring Dan’s pathetic glance. “Not on those painkillers you’re not.”  He took a swig before continuing. “Killed fifteen kids and the principal before the police got to him.”

“…ouch.”

  
“Yeah.”

“When was that?” Dan asked.

“1990? ’90 or ’91, I think.”

Dan started to type _Hannah Kaplan, 1991_ into the search bar when Jack continued. “You wanna hear the weirdest part?”

“What?”

“One of the people he killed was his own sister.”

“…I thought you said they split the kids up.”

“They did.” Jack shrugged. “She went to find him.”

“That’s some coincidence.”

“You’re tellin’ _me._ ”

The silence that fell was uncomfortable. Dan stared at the search bar, tapping his fingers against the laptop’s keyboard without actually typing anything. Jack took another swig of his beer before Dan asked, “How…how about Dad? Did he write about Kaplan?”

“Yeah, six or seven stories. You’ve…you had them all printed up and put in a notebook with yours or a binder or something for _years_.” Jack gave him another weird look. “You don’t remember that?” Dan opened his mouth to protest, and Jack shook his head. “Assume you know nothing, right. Dad was one of the few reporters Kaplan trusted to talk to the Court. He had an exclusive line to him for, like…four years, wrote nothing but glowing praise over the peaceful nature of the Court’s members…” Jack shook his head. But then the F.B.I. took him down-”

“In a flawless raid?”

“ _Flawless_ raid,” Jack confirmed, “and all the other stuff came to light. Like the bodies in the backyard. Dad took it hard at first, but...he turned it around, took it as a learning experience and wrote the last three stories. One about Brian Fleming, and one about Rachel-”

“Rachel?” Dan tilted his head. “What happened to _her_?”

“As far as I know, she’s still alive. Lives somewhere up in Washington. Remarried once she finished with the deprogrammers; she had a couple kids. Anyways, though. He wrote about Fleming, wrote about Rachel, and then he wrote a piece about the evils of cults and what their appeal was and…” He shrugged a shoulder. “It won a local Pulitzer, he hit the road a month later, and five years later you called it the kick in the pants you needed to start journalism.”

Dan took a second to process that before he asked the next question. “And…what did I write about him?”

Jack gave a small smile against the mouth of the beer bottle. “A scathing, interview-based character study comparing fathers who walk out to fathers who lead their kids astray. But…no one accused you of projecting or anything, if that’s what you’re wondering. And a lot of people thought it was a pretty good eulogy for Hannah.” He paused. “I could see if you’ve got the binder upstairs or something, if you wanted to see what you wrote…”

“There might not be a point.”

“How’s that?”

“Well…I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to save Hannah. So if I save Hannah – _when_ I save Hannah – it’ll just change again.”

He took some small measure of amusement from the way Jack’s forehead furrowed in concentration. Then his brother spoke. “So…if you save Hannah…will I forget this whole conversation?”

“At least the parts that have to do with her being dead,” Dan confirmed. Jack blinked, his blue eyes ever so slightly dazed. Dan didn’t bother holding back the chuckle.

“Welcome to my life.”


	7. Chapter 7

_June 1990_

It was hot, hellishly so, but he was beginning to get used to that. Somehow, every time he’d traveled this time around, it wound up feeling hotter than Hades. Dan blinked the bright sun out of his eyes, and tried to get his bearings.

He was in a side yard outside of a tan brick building. A large banner tied to the chain-link fence read _Welcome to Fairview High School_ , _home of the Panthers._ Dan looked over his shoulder. All he could see was through the fence was the cracked concrete of the street spreading down the hill, and a couple stubborn, scraggly trees casting shadows over the ground. The nearest blocky shape of a house was easily a quarter-mile away, down that winding road.

 _Fairview_ _. Right.  
_

It certainly didn’t live up to its name. It also seemed like a strangely desolate place to have a school. Dan scanned the rest of the perimeter, noting the cars in the parking lot, the dingy bus parked to the side. School was in session then, for all it felt like July. Listless breeze scuffed dirt and leaf rubble over the sidewalk when he stepped onto it, licking up his bandaged legs and ruffling through his hair.

The school was a rambling building, spread out like a strip mall. Dan followed the sidewalk towards the front, still feeling a strange chill prowling up his spine. He paused at the front doors, one hand on the door handle. The clock he could see through the plate glass said 10:50.

Back in the present, Jack had found him everything he could dig up on the shooting, grumbling all the while about journalists who refused to do the research. According to the documents, Jeremy Kaplan had come to school at the same time as every morning, gone to his first two classes like everything was normal, and snapped around his lunch period –

In about ten minutes, if this was the right day.

The door opened easily when he tugged on it experimentally. He shook his head, instantly reminded of the sign-in procedures he had to go through every time he went to pick up Zach- procedures in place mostly thanks to incidents like the one he was hoping to stop today. He was about to slip in when a voice broke the stifling stillness.

“Dan!”

Dan turned to look down the sidewalk, still holding the door open. Livia hurried toward him, rapidly stripping off what looked like a snow parka. Dan frowned. “Whoa, what-”

“Don’t,” Livia said, and the look she gave him was not exactly happy, “Don’t even ask.”

Dan, remembering the wedding dress fiasco, let it go with a whistle as he pulled the door the rest of the way open.

“What’s going on?” Livia demanded, discarding the parka behind the trash can. She looked down at herself and growled, peeling off the thick sweater as well.

Dan shrugged, watching her drop the sweater on top of the parka. There were still snowflakes on her bangs. He reached out to touch them, and they melted away on his fingertips.  “You remember Hannah, right?”

“Kaplan’s little girl? ’Course I do,” Livia said, far more brightly now that she’d shed several layers. “We’re still working on that?”

Jack’s voice floated back to him. _One of the people he killed was his own sister._

“Yeah.” Dan stepped into the school, Livia on his heels. “We’re here to keep her from getting murdered.”

*

There seemed to be an air of tension in the school as they walked through the halls. Dan could hear the distant murmuring of student voices, the scrape of chairs on linoleum, the slamming of locker doors -  all very normal noises for a school, but the knowledge of what was about to happen gave the whole scene an eerie feeling.

“Where are we even supposed to look?” Livia asked, pausing at a trophy case outside the principal’s office. Her fingers squeaked against the glass as she brushed away an imaginary smudge. Dan shrugged at her reflection in the glass.

“Jack said that she was shot in the cafeteria…”

Livia took one more look at the trophies in the case. The most recent, most brightly shining cup said _May 1990_ engraved on it. Dan could see the cogs turning in her head with that look, and she didn’t disappoint him.

“Why’s she even at a high school?” She asked, following him down the hall. “She’ll be…what, twenty this year?”

“Twenty-one, actually.” He turned the corner, passing the gym and rows of lockers, feet loud in the halls as they followed the signs towards the office. “I think…we’re pretty sure she came looking for Jeremy.”

“Her little brother Jeremy, I assume,” Livia clarified, “Not her dad.”

“Right.” Dan drew in a breath, letting it out in a sigh when it made the scabbing cuts on his chest burn. “The secretary said Hannah asked the principal to let her talk to him and…well.” He could still see the headlines on the articles Jack found: _Principal Dixon and fifteen students dead._ “I figure, as long as we’re between the office and the cafeteria…”

“We’ll run into them.” Livia finished his thought. He nodded, peering down one of the side halls. “Does that,” she said, nudging his arm, “look like Hannah?”

Coming down the hall towards them was a rapidly balding man in a polo shirt and a young woman with a tousled mop of light brown hair. She was listening to the man – probably the principal – earnestly, nodding every now and again. Dan started to draw back around the corner when she looked up, recognition flaring bright and startled in her blue eyes.

“ _Dan_?”

Well. No need to play it subtle now. Hannah and the principal stopped, the principal eyeing Dan from head to toe.

“Who are you?”

Dan opened his mouth to answer, but Hannah spoke first.

“Um, excuse me, Mr. Dixon, but these are Dan and Livia, they’re…they were my foster parents.” Hannah clasped her hands in front of her as Livia gave Dan a look. Dan couldn’t help the small smile that tugged at his lips. Hannah continued, “I just thought… well, they helped me so much, maybe they’d be able to help Jeremy too.” She ducked her head, caught Livia’s hand and gave it a small squeeze. “I’m sorry, I just… I’m worried.”

It was a good act. Principal Dixon turned his suspicious eye to Livia instead now. Livia reached out her free hand to shake, smiling almost sweetly.

“Mr. Dixon, it’s a pleasure to meet you, I’m Doctor Vassar.”

Livia had played the right card. Dixon’s eyebrows went up. “ _Doctor_ Vassar?” He said, forgetting that Dan existed entirely, “Doctor of…?”

“I’m a practicing child psychologist,” Liva adlibbed as Hannah freed her hand, falling back to walk beside Dan. “I specialize in adolescents, which is why Hannah called me.”

“Smooth,” Dan commented sotto voce as Hannah caught hold of his arm. Her fingers were cold and shaking, and when they pressed a little too tightly to the bandages he couldn’t bite back the hiss of pain. Hannah let go immediately, eyes wide.

“Have you ever been convinced something didn’t happen, when on _some_ level you know it did?” She muttered back, voice strained. “You just proved I’m not crazy.”

“You doubted?” Dan asked, looking at her. She met his eyes, challenge flickering in her stare for a second, but she looked away first.

“Eleven year olds have wild imaginations. That was a weird, _weird_ night.”

“I won’t argue with you there.”

“But everything’s exactly the same….” Her fingertips tapped against the bandages. “How long has it been…?”

“For me? About…” He tried to think, tried to add up all those hazy hours in the hospital, in the house on the couch, tried not to let the thoughts of the table, -of hands around his, of blades in his skin- take over. He only moderately succeeded. “…six days.”

“Wow.” Hannah frowned as, up ahead of them, Livia laughed musically at something Dixon had said. “I…well, I’d say I’d forgotten how bad Dad cut you up, but…” Her laugh was almost bitter in counterpoint to Livia’s voice. “Didn’t really have that luxury.”

“Hey.” Dan nudged her, slightly. “It’s alright. The doctors…everyone says I’ll be alright.”  _If I survive trying to save you. Or your brother. Whichever of you I’m supposed to be saving._ “Why are you here, anyways?”

The whole story slipped out as they walked towards the cafeteria, following Livia and the principal. Hannah talked about exchanging letters for years as their foster parents allowed; about seeing Jeremy at holidays – and about how, with his most recent move, the letters had changed.

“I don’t know how the kids found out, but they did, and…you know how kids can be.” Hannah’s voice sounded a bit smaller at those words. Dan thought back to high school – for him, it hadn’t been that bad; having a hot-tempered older brother heading for the police academy had helped, but for a lot of kids it _had_ been bad – and nodded, reluctantly.

“I’m just…afraid he’ll do something dumb, so…” She raised her hands in a clear helpless gesture. “Here I am.”

“And I think that’s great – but I also think you should leave.”

“Wait, what?” Hannah stopped in her tracks; Dan almost ran into her. Up ahead, Dixon and Livia had disappeared into the cafeteria. The wave of noise coming through the doors was almost tangible, though it cut off when the door swung closed.

“You…you said it yourself.” Dan licked his lips, barreled on. “You’re worried. You don’t know what he’s up to, or what he’ll do. I think you should stay out here. Let _us_ talk to him.”

Hannah gave him a _look_. “ _You_ don’t know what he’s gone through,” she argued. “I mean, yes, Dad did….pretty messed up things to you, let Jeremy pretty messed up too, but it’s not the same. He knows me, and he trusts me, and he…he sure doesn’t trust _Dixon_.” She started walking again; her face set stubbornly as she pushed the cafeteria door open. “ _I_ have to see him too.”

“Hannah, you don’t know what’s going _on._ ” The noise from the cafeteria stopped; the hallway remained silent even as Hannah opened through the door. Dan cursed under his breath and lunged after her. “Hannah, _sto-”_

Hannah _had_ stopped, right inside the cafeteria door. Every student and teacher in the room had also frozen, stock still, all eyes on to the table in the nearest corner. Dan turned; hand still on Hannah’s elbow.  Jeremy Kaplan Junior had grown up to be a big kid: tall and sturdy, his sandy-blond hair thick and shaggy, almost covering his eyes. He stood at the table, his hands clenched in fists, chest heaving, his tray and its contents strewn over the floor at Dixon’s feet.

_Oh, boy._

“Jeremy!” Hannah called out, and the boy turned to look at her. For a moment his face showed relief – but then his grey eyes passed over Dan’s face, and the relief evaporated in a wave of panicked recognition. He turned towards Livia, and the recognition just grew.

“Oh my _god_ , it’s _you_!”

Dan might have been more tempted to follow that statement and see what Jeremy meant if the boy hadn’t punctuated the sentence by pulling a gun out of the back waistband of his jeans.

“Jeremy, no!”

“Livia, _down_!”

Both shouted simultaneously, nearly drowned out by the echoing bang of a gunshot. Livia dropped to the floor at the same time as Dan and Hannah and half the kids in the cafeteria.

The bullet missed her entirely.

The principal was not so lucky. It hit – where, exactly, Dan couldn’t say, there was too much chaos – and he went down hard, yelling.

In the wake of the myriad school shootings of the 90s and the 00s, most people claimed to know what they would do, that they knew how to best defuse a situation like this. But all the planning in the world couldn’t really prepare someone for the actuality of the event.

Dan – body screaming from the _last_ time he’d been abused at the hand of a Kaplan – started to rise. Another shot rang out, and the other half of the kids that _hadn’t_ dove for cover yet did so, Dan right on their heels. Jeremy tipped his table over with a crash that resounded through the cafeteria and drowned out the whimpers of the bleeding principal, efficiently propping his gun-hand on the edge, holding it steady.

“What,” Livia hissed in Dan’s ear a second later, so sudden that he nearly banged his head on the table above him, “do we do now?”

“Sit tight until he runs out of bullets?” Dan offered, and Livia gave him a dirty look. “Right, that’s not an option, I know, but-”

A sudden, ear-splitting sound rang through the cafeteria, and this time he _did_ jump, the table smacking the back of his skull. The pain sent stars behind his eyes, but he blinked them away in time to see the kids charging en masse for the exit doors.

Hannah had pulled the fire alarm, and fire-drill instinct had taken over.

Dan started to crawl out from under the table to follow the students towards safety, but Livia grabbed his arm, dragged him back under their makeshift shelter as a bullet slammed into the floor, right where his hand would have been. “He’s watching _us_ ,” she hissed. “Not _them_. Not anymore.”

The sudden stillness in the wake of the fleeing kids was unnerving. Dan strained his ears, but no sound reached them other than the wail of the fire alarm and the sound of Livia’s breathing.

“Jeremy?” Hannah called out from somewhere on the other side of the cafeteria, voice quavering over the strident ring of the siren. “Jeremy, can you hear me?”

Jack had said the girl was shot in the cafeteria – but fifteen students had been killed, too, and now only Hannah, the time travelers and the injured principal were here. Things had already changed, at least somewhat. Hopefully for the better.

There was no response, regardless. Dan held his breath, reaching up to clamp his hand around the furthest edge of the table. He shoved, hissing back another gasp, but the table didn’t move until Livia caught on to what he was doing. She helped him tip it over, turning it into a wall between them and Jeremy.

“I don’t think it would be a very good idea to run for it,” Dan murmured, and Livia snorted inelegantly.

“In _your_ condition? No. You wouldn’t even make it halfway to the door.”

“…yeah, that was kind of the point.”

There was a scuffle of movement from further down the row of tables, and Hannah came crawling to join them, face pinched with worry. She paused next to Dan, peering around the edge of their wall carefully. Dan tapped her on the shoulder, and she looked up at him, slightly lost.

“You said we don’t know what he’s going through,” Dan said, “So why don’t you tell us?”

Hannah pulled back behind the table. “He, ah,” she had to half-shout to be heard. “He said it started back in September, some kid found out who Dad was; started calling him a killer, just…constantly commenting on it, and…it just spread. I mean, I think the elementary school kids made up a jump-rope rhyme and everything…” Hannah said the last just as the fire alarm stopped blaring its distress through the school. The words echoed off the walls in its wake.

 “It doesn’t even _rhyme_.” Jeremy’s answering snarl was loud in the silence.  “You’d think that if they’re going to make up stupid poems about me, they might as well _rhyme_.”

“Look, Jeremy,” Dan spoke, and even his voice sounded strange through the ringing in his ears, “I don’t know what they’ve said to you or called you, but I do know that it doesn’t _have_ to be you.” There was red on the cafeteria’s linoleum, spreading out from underneath the principal, just in sight around the edge of the table. He swallowed, fighting the urge to rub his arm.

“How do you know?” Jeremy’s voice was stress-tight and gravely; it cracked halfway through the sentence. “They could be right. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I could be just…I could be _just like_ him!”

“You don’t believe that!” Hannah called over the table, “Unless you’ve been lying to me for years…”

“I wasn’t lying!” Jeremy insisted, “I just…I know more now that I did then.”

“We _all_ do. Which is why _I_ know this isn’t _you_.” Hannah rubbed her hand over her eyes. “Jeremy…kiddo…” Jeremy made a sound like one Dan would expect from a wounded animal, still holed up behind his table. Hannah winced.

“Jeremy,” she continued her voice soft and soothing, reminding Dan of every time when he was little and he’d skinned his knees and Jack had come running to help, or of any time Katie patched up Zack’s skinned knees, iced his bumps and bruises. “This _doesn’t_ have to be you. It doesn’t ever have to be you. You can’t let them choose who you are for you. You can choose to be someone else.”

The answering bark of laughter wasn’t reassuring. “…yeah, sure. Did your time-traveling angel out there tell you that?”

Dan sighed, despite the fact that yes, actually, he _had_ told her that – sixteen years ago.

 “I already told you, I’m _not_ an angel!”

“Then how come you always show up every time my life goes to hell?” Jeremy paused, and when he spoke again there was speculation and suspicion in his tone. “...maybe you’re right. That’s not exactly angelic behavior, is it? Maybe you’re a demon...”

Livia went still next to him, making a soft huffing noise low in her throat. Her expression – when Dan dared to look at her – was torn between amusement, disbelief and worry.

“Maybe Dad was right. Maybe it _is_ our job to kill you. Maybe that’s why you keep coming back to us…” Something scraped past their table barrier, and Dan found himself staring into Livia’s eyes again before he looked wildly at Hannah.

“How far away’s the police department?”

“Close enough,” the girl said, “I mean, they should have been on their way after the fire alarms…” As if her words alone had summoned them, the sound of fire and police sirens echoed through the school. Dan breathed a sigh of relief.

Too soon.

Gunfire tore through the table, chasing Dan out into the open when he dove. Pain ripped through his shoulder, and he couldn’t tell for the life of him if it was from his older wounds or if he’d been hit again. He sprawled in an ungainly heap in the middle of the cafeteria, dimly aware of the pool of blood he’d skidded through, that there were people outside the still-open emergency exit doors, that Livia was climbing to her feet – dimly aware of all of this beyond the sight of Jeremy Kaplan taking aim at his face…

And Hannah, lunging for him from the side.

She tackled the gangling teen just as he fired. The shot went wild, ricocheting into the florescent lights with a shower of sparks. The gun skittered out of Jeremy’s hand as he hit the floor, and the sound of it pierced through both sides of Dan’s aching head…

_Wait, headache?  
_

“He’s down, he’s down, don’t shoot!” someone yelled – Livia or Hannah or someone else, he couldn’t really focus to figure out as a pair of police officers burst through the door. Dan almost collapsed again with relief, right in the middle of the floor, but the sharp ache in his shoulder and arm, the fact that his pants were now damp with someone else’s blood kept him upright. He started to crawl towards the principal, but the room spun rather unhelpfully and he fell to his back behind the table barrier.

“Dan!” Livia yelled.

This time he managed to howl back “I’m okay!” just as the light took him.


	8. Chapter 8

“...I can’t believe you got shot in the past.”

Dan glared up at Jack over the end of the couch as Katie paced back and forth, back and forth, _back and forth_ in the foyer, making phone call after phone call. The first aid kit he and Katie had picked up after they realized the journeying wasn’t going to just go away was disassembled, spread in front of him like a halo of bandages and antiseptics; the dishtowel Jack pressed firmly against his shoulder was spotted with blood. They’d already forced him to take his pain medications, so at least the fresh pain and the old pain had both faded to a muted throb.

“Shut up,” he grumbled, “It happens more often than you think.” It was something of a relief to be able to _say_ things like that to Jack; to know that his older brother didn’t really think he was going insane anymore.

_Either that, or he’s decided he’s nuts too._

Jack barked a laugh that did nothing to help Dan decide which option it was. “With _you_? I don’t doubt it.”

“Hey!” Dan protested, “I’ve only been shot once before, and that was….”

The almost-relief, almost-fun dropped out from beneath the painkillers about then, like the air leaking from a balloon, sucked away by the rapid flash of unwanted memories behind his eyelids.

Jack finished the sentence for him. “…right here. Aw, man, I’m sorry. I shoulda kept my mouth shut.”

Dan let his eyes drift half-open, leaning his head against the couch’s arm-rest, fighting his way free of the thoughts with some difficulty. “Don’t worry, I’m used to it by now…”

If Jack had a response, Dan didn’t hear it. The painkillers blurred the passage of time. It might have been five minutes, might have been an hour before Jack shifted his grip and Dan’s eyes fluttered open to see Katie hang up the phone and hurry back into the living room.

“Ok, I found someone who I think possibly shouldn’t ask questions?” She said, scrubbing her hand through her messy curls. She blew out a breath and continued. “I hope? I feel…really weird. This feels criminal. Is it criminal?”

“What, this? Nooo,” Jack hurried to reassure her, though Dan almost thought he looked kind-of worried about it himself. “We just…tell the good doc that it was an…accident? And we pay them off and they never mention it and…”

“Jack,” Katie looked vaguely stricken for a second. Jack just rambled on.

“…and we all go our merry way and they forget it ever-”

“Jack, I had to call Theresa.”

“…oh. My. God. I’m _doomed_.”

*

“Ow.”

“Hush. You’re lucky this was just a graze.”

Theresa eyed him like she expected him to go insane and start biting at any moment as she sewed up the new gash on his shoulder. Jack had fled the couch the moment his girlfriend pulled out the needles and thread, his eyes as wide as a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming semi.

She had given him a _look,_ and he froze in his tracks, before he could make his escape.

“You know I have to report this, right?”

Jack’s eyes flicked to Dan’s. Dan tried to ignore the pointed metal buried in his shoulder, tried not to pay attention to the angry, pregnant lady digging it in.

“Can you get me the laptop?” he asked, and Theresa glowered at him. He let his mouth snap shut when she continued. 

“This is a gunshot wound, Jack. I have to tell the police.”

Jack shifted in the doorway. “Theresa, I _am_ the police.”

 “You’re also not stable when it comes to your brother,” Theresa pointed out dryly, pulling the needle through again. It had the feel of an old, familiar argument somehow.

“…you know,” Dan drawled, equally dryly as he met her dark eyes, “I _am_ right here.” He caught a glimpse of black, bristling thread and hurriedly looked away again.

Theresa paused, looking vaguely sheepish. “No offense.”

“Oh, none taken.”

Jack fled before Theresa could continue, but he returned moments later with the laptop. Theresa let Dan boot it up while she worked – mostly because it soon became apparent he wouldn’t sit still much longer, otherwise.

_Jeremy Kaplan_ and _school shooting_ had over a thousand results when he searched. There had only been one death, the principle, instead of the much larger death count before he’d traveled the first time. Jeremy had been arrested, tried for the murder and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.

He’d still escaped in 2005.

Dan sighed, feeling his eyes aching. He started to lift his hand, absently, without thinking, the drugs still numbing the pain. Theresa let out a wordless noise that, nonetheless, sounded an awful lot like _no_ , though she didn’t go quite as far as to smack his hand down. He lowered his free hand again, and typed in _Hannah Kaplan_ with the other _._

The early ‘90s articles about her painted the young woman as a selfless hero, recklessly throwing herself at Jeremy to save the lives of the students. They spoke about her undergrad work at Berkley, her grad work specializing in child and adolescent psychology. There were papers by her, thesis work, mentions of experiments and theories and practices spreading throughout the decade…

But there were no records of Doctor Hannah Kaplan existing after 2001.

“There,” Theresa said, drawing Dan from his reading. “All done…” She tied the last stitch off, snipped the thread and started to peel off her gloves all in one smooth motion. She happened to glance at the computer screen as she did so, and paused.

“Hannah Kaplan. I remember her…”

“Really?” Dan cocked his head. “What do you know about her?”

“I just know she was some big, up-and-coming practitioner. And that some people didn’t like where she came from, you know?” she eyed Dan’s bandages as if she wanted to ask something, but thought better of it. “She disappeared, I guess, after enough people made a big enough stink. Everyone thought she killed herself or something…” She finished pulling off her gloves, bundling one into the other in a neat clump. “What’s so important about her?”

_I’m not sure yet._

*

Dan woke with a start, his heart pounding in his neck and his ears. 

The breeze blowing in through the open window was warm, soothing against his skin. There was still sun streaming through the window, casting glowing pathways on the floor. The clock above the television said 3:50. He lay on the blanket-covered couch for a moment, trying to figure out what had woken him in the first place, or even if there _was_ a reason he’d woken up, other than nerves.

The house was completely silent, other than the sound of someone fiddling around in the kitchen. A moment later, Jack came into the living room, carrying a piece of pizza and another bottle of beer. 

“It lives!” He said with a grin, flopping down on the end of the couch, narrowly missing Dan’s feet. Dan thought idly of kicking him, but decided that would take too much effort and settled for a baleful glower instead. “How you feeling?”

“Like I wound up on the wrong side of a hedge trimmer,” Dan said, slowly pushing himself up into a seated position. “How long was I out?”

Jack folded his pizza, took a bit, and asked with his mouth full, “What’s the last day you remember?”

“…that bad?”

“No,” Jack swallowed and shook his head. “You fell asleep as soon as Theresa left, so that’s about...twenty hours. We figured that if you were that deep asleep for that long, your body needed it.” It was a good point, Dan had to concede. Jack leaned over to snag a water bottle and offer it to his brother. Once he’d taken a swig of the water, washing away some of the wooly feeling in his mouth, he looked at the clock again. 3:55.

“So, I’m still here. Does that mean you convinced Theresa not to report the gunshot wound?”

“Hey, I don’t _convince_ Theresa about anything. She decides, and I get swept along with the tides.” He paused. “I ‘owe’ her a ‘complete explanation’ when we go out on Friday. I’ll be relying on your creative writing skills to get me out of _that_.”

“I’m not your Cyrano de Bergerac!”

“No, but ‘My brother got shot stopping a school massacre in 1991’ is lacking in important things like…reality.” Jack countered. “And sanity. And do you really want to be responsible for my _one_ successful relationship folding up?”

Jack didn’t say it, but part of Dan suspected that if he poked too hard an _again_ would tack itself onto that sentence. He changed the subject, quickly.

“Have they found your car yet?” 

Jack frowned, carding his hand through his short hair. “No.” The simple word sounded like a curse. 

Something about the car and the timing still tugged at his brain. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it nagged at him as he tried to think, watching Jack sit and sulk over his half-eaten pizza. 

“Are you…am I allowed to get up?” He asked, and Jack shrugged.

“Sure. Just…take it easy.”

Dan worked his way to his feet. The clock said 4:00. That nebulous _something_ still nagged at the back of his head, and he stared at the clock face for a moment longer, willing it to sink in. 

“Hey…Jack?”

“Hmm?”

“Where’s Zack?”

Jack shoved the rest of the pizza crust in his mouth, gulped another mouthful of his beer. 

“At school?” He said, with a shrug. “Wh-” he followed Dan’s gaze to the clock, as if seeing it for the first time. “ _Oh_.”

“ _Yeah._ ” The pain and the confusion were instantly buried by a wave of worried fear. Dan fumbled his cell phone out of his pocket, dialed Zack’s school’s phone number. Mrs. Brabson’s familiar voice was cheery in his ear. 

“Bayside Elementary School! How may I help you?”

“Uh, hi, Mrs. Brabson, this is Dan Vassar, Zack Vassar’s father. Has...my, uh. My brother was supposed to be picking Zack up and they’re not here yet, and I just wanted to make sure he got picked up…” Jack glared at him, mouthing ‘sure, blame _me_ ,’ but Dan frowned right back at him, holding up his finger. 

“Oh, Officer Jack?” The receptionist’s voice went, if possible, even more cheerful. “Yes, Zack got picked up about half an hour ago. I saw that car of his myself. Can’t really mistake if for anyone else’s. My husband always says…” 

The look on Jack’s face mirrored his own as Dan hung up the phone. 

“Dan…”

“I don’t believe in coincidences anymore, Jack.”

*

Ten minutes later, the cherry red Mustang rumbled up the narrow street and parked on the curb. Dan looked at Jack. Jack looked at Dan. The house phone rang, shattering the tense silence between them. Jack lunged for it, snagged it before it had a chance to ring a second time, turning it so they both could hear.

“Hello, Dan.” The voice was twenty years older, twenty years gruffer, but Dan would know it in his sleep. 

“Jerry.”

“You remember me. I’m flattered.” The voice on the other end of the phone paused. “Though I guess I shouldn’t be, it was just yesterday for you, wasn’t it?”

Dan glowered through the curtains at the car. He couldn’t see into Jack’s car clearly, but he could see movement through the windows. 

“What do you want?”

“Well. You’re a good dad, right, so I assume you’ve noticed your kid’s not home yet.” Fear spiked through him at the confirmation, sharper than any fear he’d ever felt for himself; almost a physical blow to his stomach. “All I had to do was show up in his uncle’s car…”

“ _What do you want_?” Jack growled, and Jerry’s laugh was loud through the earpiece.

“I want,” Jerry said when he could speak again, “to finish a conversation that you and I started a long time ago. How’s that sound?”

Jack shook his head next time Dan looked at him. Dan clapped his hand over the phone’s mouthpiece as his brother said, low. 

“You can’t trade.”

“He has Zack, man. What am I _supposed_ to do?”

He knew what his brother would say in any _other_ case. _Wait for a negotiator. Call the police._ But this was Zack and this was not any other case. Jack grimaced, went to clap Dan on the shoulder and stopped when he realized what he was doing.

“Play along, for now. I’ll go for reinforcements.”

Dan started to agree when another sensation panged through him, strong and fierce, starting from his forehead and spreading down. “…I don’t know if they’ll be needed,” he said, rubbing across his cheekbone. It did nothing to alleviate the pain. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jack asked, and Dan turned aching eyes towards him. “Oh. _Oh_.”

“I’m waiting, Daniel…” Jeremy sing-songed. “I supposed I could hold the conversation with little Zack here, but-” the sigh was audible over the phone line. “-it just wouldn’t be the same.”

“I guess I have a few minutes to talk,” Dan finally said, trying to keep the worry out of his tone. “How do you want to do this?”

“You come out. You get halfway to the car and I’ll let your kid out. He’ll walk to the house; you’ll get in the car. But, you pull anything funny and I swear to God I’ll shoot him in the back before he gets back to the house.”

He hung up. Dan swallowed, didn’t look at Jack. 

“Keep your phone on you as long as you can.”

“Just get Zack someplace safe. And when…when I _leave,_ get Hugh. Tell him to look for Hannah.”   
  
“But you said--"   
  
“Just _tell_ him!”

*

Jack bridled at the whole plan. Dan could feel him vibrating with barely contained anger next to him at the door. But there wasn’t much else they could do right now. Dan swallowed, pushed open the door and walked out, feeling his legs going stiffer with each step further from safety.

Jeremy kept his word. The moment Dan hit the sidewalk, the passenger door opened and Zack came rocketing out, tears in his eyes when he launched himself into his father’s arms.

“Dad, dad, dad, don’t, stay, don’t go with him, he’s _crazy_ and scary and _mean_ and-”

Dan could just barely see sunlight gleaming on the barrel of a gun as he held his son close, regardless of the way thin, strong arms closed around sore muscles and aching skin.

“I’ll be alright, I promise,” he whispered to the dandelion-soft hair against his lips. “You need to go to Uncle Jack now, though. Be brave.”

“But _dad_ …”

And then Jack was there, prying Zack’s fingers loose, pulling him into a hug just as tight as Zack’s had been. The gun’s muzzle kept moving, following Zack. The sight made Dan’s throat clog. If he’d been healthier, if the gun was pointing at _him_ , he would have ran for the house, or tried to beat Jeremy to the punch, but as it was, all he could do was square his shoulders and walk the last few feet to the car, trying not to listen to his son yelling for him to come back.

*

Dan could feel his cell phone burning in his pocket, prayed that Jeremy wouldn’t take it, turn it off and throw it to the side of the road. But the other man just drove, the gun still pointed at the center of Dan’s chest.

“I know you’re thinkin’ all sorts of heroic get-aways,” he remarked, waving the gun just a bit, “But you lunge for the wheel, I will drive us off the road; you lunge for me and I will shoot you.” He looked at Dan out of the corner of his eyes. “And I know that so long as there’s a chance for you to get back to that dear little boy of yours…”

Dan just ground his teeth, staring at the road ahead, praying for the headache to grow worse. Jeremy reached out with the gun, nudged one of the bandages on Dan’s nearest arm.

“Take off the band-aids.”

He thought for a second about grabbing for the gun, but Jeremy hadn’t sounded like he was messing around. Dan unwrapped the bandages, peeled off the gauze and let it fall.

  
“Well, look at that. You’ve even got the cuts, like it was _all_ just yesterday…” Jeremy ran his finger along the shallow groove Theresa had just stitched up last night, his fingers gentle around the red-edged cuts that still spread over Dan’s arm. He dropped the bandage on the floor. “ _Was_ it just yesterday? For you, I mean?”

“Yesterday, day before yesterday, three days ago…this hasn’t been my best week.”  
Jeremy barked a laugh, shaking his head.

“I wouldn’t imagine.”

The ache was spreading. Dan swallowed hard as his eyes began to water. The splitting headache had shifted to his temples now, and he began to feel the sinking suspicion that maybe, this time, it _had_ just been pain. Real pain, not something linked to his traveling…

But then it blossomed behind his eyes, and he could barely hear Jeremy’s words. 

“Do you want to know why I-”

Light flashed, and for once Dan wished he could hear what happened next.


	9. Chapter 9

_2000_

“Hannah.”

Dan’s voice broke the silence in the little hotel room. It had only taken a minute or two to find the girl-turned-woman this time. He had traveled to a dingy, run-down motel in some town he didn’t recognize. A simple lie, a simple look at the motel’s sign-in book. A simple matter of a credit card and the bobby pin he always carried in his wallet now.

 Livia would be proud of him, bending the rules like this.

“Daniel.” Hannah gave him a half-smile, sitting at the hotel-room desk, her head pillowed on her arms. Dan moved to sit gingerly on the edge of the desk, resisting the urge to reach out and touch her hair. That would be too familiar. He didn’t know her that well and she was almost as old as he was besides.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

Hannah shrugged without sitting up. “Probably because I’m not.”

“No?”

“You told me you were watching over me. Us.” She shrugged one shoulder again, tracing her finger through the intricate network of varicolored pills laid out on the desk. Three or four empty bottles lay on the floor, wine and medication alike. “I kinda suspected you’d be here sooner or later.”

_How come you always show up every time my life goes to hell?_   Jeremy’s words skated over his mind.

It would be nice, for once, to arrive at a happy point in someone else’s life. Just once.

Dan sighed, scrubbing his hands down his face, but not – like he truly wanted – reaching out to dash the pills away. Not yet.

“Hannah. You’re a doctor, remember? You help people? Kids?” Dan spouted everything he remembered from the articles he’d found and from what Theresa had told him; waved his hand around the sparse hotel, the rainbow of medications, his eyes questioning. “What happened? Why are you here?”

Hannah laughed, rubbing her eyes. She looked older than almost-thirty-two, somehow, when she straightened up.

“I did have a good thing goin’, didn’t I?” She sighed, wistfully, leaning over the chair so her curly brown hair cascaded over the back rest, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. “I liked it. People liked me…” Her face went stormy, haunted. “At least, I thought they did…” She carded her hands through her curls.

“You…you remember what happened with Jerry, right? With the kids…finding out who he was?” She sat up, tapped her fingers against the table, drumming against the pitted wood. “Or who _Dad_ was?”

“Yes, of course.” _Mostly because for me it only happened yesterday._ His shoulder panged at the thought, and he reached up to rub the bandage, only to pause when his fingers met stitches and skin instead. …right. His fingers flinched away from the tender flesh as he kept his eyes on Hannah.

“Well, it happened with me.” Hannah bent over, reached out to pick up a newspaper on the floor. The motion sent bottles clanking together on the musty carpet. She flipped the newspaper over so Dan could see the front page. The bottom held a story with a large, accusatory headline: _Local shrink – bad blood?_

“Apparently, practicing psychiatrists can’t have skeletons like that in the closet. Not in _this_ town.”

Dan carefully extricated the paper from her fingers, glancing at the date. _September 5, 2000._

He shrugged again, trying not to appear too cavalier. “Alright, so they found out. So what? What’s that mean for you?”

“No one will return my calls. I have-” She paused, laughed, another cynical sound, “had twenty regular patients at the clinic. None of ‘em came in for their appointments this week; none of their parents even made a courtesy call. I mean, I’m not… I can’t say I entirely blame them, but…” She waved her hand, indicating the room. “If I don’t have that, if I don’t have people to help… I don’t…don’t have anything.”

Dan tried to imagine what it would be like if his coworkers or neighbors turned on him. The thought wasn’t exactly pleasant. He let her keep talking.

“I’ve been working in this town for five years, you’d think…you’d think they’d know me by now.” She laughed again. It wasn’t any happier than the last time she looked. “Instead, I get threatening phone calls and dirty looks and bricks through my window.”

He could hear the pain in her voice; hear the betrayal as she saw, first hand, what her brother had gone through almost ten years ago. He finally reached out, rested his hand on her head. She lifted her eyes to meet his, and he felt a small smile playing around his lips.

“This doesn’t have to be you.” He said, lightly. “It doesn’t….

“… _ever_ have to be you,” she finished, looking away with another scowl. But scowling showed an emotion other than dejection, and that was a start. Dan tried to keep his voice light.

“I’m serious! I was serious back then, and I’m serious now. You believed me then, or you never would have used my dumb lines on your kid brother. You’re smart, you know what you’re doing and…you’re going to let these people make that decision for you?” He let the disbelief he was feeling creep into his voice. “Let them decide who you are and what you can do? Honestly, I thought you were smarter than that. You could help change so many lives for the better…”

Hannah snorted, the sound inelegant, but at least it held a tone of genuine amusement. Dan elbowed her in the ribs, gently. She didn’t look at him.

“C’mon. Have I ever led you astray before?”

It was a risky card to play, but he flipped it anyways, hoping it’d have the desired effect. She met his gaze then, bottom lip between her teeth. The familiar gesture made her look like a scared five year old again.

“No,” she finally said, almost reluctantly.

“So trust me now. I guarantee you. They’ll find something else to worry about.”

She kept her stare steady, testing his expression for any indication that he was lying. He kept the innocent look, though he could feel some of the pain from his injuries starting to seep through.

It felt like a long time before she finally nodded, sharply, the decision made, the die cast.

“Let me take a look at your arm.”

*

He let her bandage him back up and, in exchange, she let him flush the pills; let him drive her home.

“Have you…you haven’t heard from Jerry lately, have you?” He finally asked after they reached her apartment on the outskirts of the same town as the hotel. It was small place, but neatly kept, with a homey sort of feel. A grey cat insinuated itself between his ankles when he stepped through the door, meowing, and Hannah scooped it up, draped it over her shoulder as she shook her head.

“He didn’t ever really forgive me for tackling him.” She paused, waving her hand at a framed photograph of her and Jerry, probably a year or two before the attack at the school. “Looking at it from his point of view, I can’t say I blame him. As far as he was concerned, I destroyed his best chance to ‘fight his own battles’ as he put it. He sent me one letter. It basically cursed me out for Dad paying more attention to me than he did to Jerry.”

“You saved my life that day, you know.”

Hannah rubbed the cat under its chin. Dan could hear its rusty purring from where he stood. “I know.”

It was almost peaceful here. There was no one shooting, no one shouting, no one looming with sharpened knives. Dan sat down on the couch, looking around the apartment again. There were bookshelves and a television, magazines on the coffee table – there were an equal number of trade journals and old issues of National Geographic.

_There’s too much potential here._

“Look, about the people here…Even if they don’t forgive and forget,” Dan said, “it doesn’t mean everything’s over. Have you ever thought about joining a charity or something? Doctors Without Borders, the Peace Corp…they’re always looking for good workers, and I don’t think they’d be all that worried about who your dad was…”

Hannah looked back at him, the wheels in her head clearly turning. Her cat nudged her cheek with its nose, and she pushed it away gently.

“I mean,” Dan continued, “yeah, sure, the pay is crap, but…”

“I didn’t become a shrink to get paid well, Dan.”

“Sure you didn’t,” Dan teased. The look she shot him reminded him of the girl who had tackled Jerry more than it reminded him of the woman sitting with the pills. He knew which he definitely preferred.

“No,” he added, more seriously. “I know.” He looked back at the magazines, feeling the ache building again. “Just… _if_ you decide to go that route- the Peace Corp or whatever- if it’s at _all_ possible, try to get back to California by May 2008.”

Hannah cocked her head. “Why?”

_It might be important?_ Dan thought, but outwardly he just grinned.

“Because it’d be cool to meet you in my present for once, I think. I want you to meet my kid, since I told you about him.”

It took a minute or two, but eventually Hannah returned his smile. “I’d like that, I think.”

*

The breeze felt strange, stilted, when reality reasserted itself.

Dan blinked, trying to refocus, and when he did the reason became clear.

He was standing in the middle of the Compound’s living room. The big windows that the F.B.I. had come through were broken, lying in shards and chunks all over the stone floor, covered in a layer of dust and dead plants.

Dan’s hand closed around the cell phone, but his fingers fumbled before he could dial the number. A shadowed looked over his shoulder. He started to turn, and the shadow’s owner hit him like a brick wall.


	10. Chapter 10

Dan’s hands were over his head when his eyes flickered open.

Adrenaline flooded his sore muscles at the position, at the way the cuff at his wrist rubbed his skin, the way it tugged on his injuries, held him stretched out the way too-hot, too-gentle hands had less than a week ago. One hand was loose, still, but his fingers didn’t hit anything when he jolted half-upright. The metal cuff bit into his wrist and jerked him back down flat.

It didn’t really matter. What he had seen through the orange lights glittering in his periphery had been enough.  He was still in the compound, though the ceiling was water-stained, the wood paneling on the walls crumpled inwards as if it was soggy paper and everything was covered with dust.

Somehow, Jerry had beaten him there in the present.

“You remember this, don’t you Dan?”

Jerry’s voice broke the heavy silence, his feet scraping on the dusty floor when he moved to lean over Dan. The years had not been kind to the youngest Kaplan. He had his father’s silky blonde hair and strong features, but right now his hair needed washing, and his otherwise handsome face was twisted in a strange, feral happiness. He wore an ill-fitting rusty red robe over his clothes. It wasn’t exactly like his father’s, but it was close enough to count.

“I didn’t at first,” Jeremy confided. “I had to have a little help.”

Dan turned his head in the direction Jerry glanced, and hissed in an instinctive gasp.

Jeremy Kaplan senior, lay sprawled on the floor, quite dead. Angry red lacerations, cut deep, made a horribly familiar pattern along his arms, his chest, and his legs.

“I told him that I found you, told him it was time…” Jerry sat on the edge of the table as he talked. He held an awfully familiar knife in his hand; he kept playing with it, tapping the blade against the table. “He thought I needed him to kill you, but really…I needed him so I could become him. Become the priest. It never would have been Hannah. She never would have killed him. It’s all about mantles, after all…” He paused. “But you should know that.”

“Why would I know that?” Dan asked, trying to keep his eyes off the constantly-moving knife blade. It kept flashing in the fire-tinged light.

_Maybe if I time it just right I can grab it and…_

And what? He’d still be cuffed to the table at the mercy of a man who, thus far, didn’t really seem to have any.

Jerry shrugged.

“Because you inherited your father’s mantle, didn’t you?”

“…huh?”

“When I was a little boy, there was always an article in the living room.” Jerry looked around the room, almost fondly. “It would have been right over there…” He pointed with the knife. Dan reluctantly followed the motion towards the closet where they’d all hid the night of the F.B.I. raid. The article he’d noticed that night was gone – really, everything was gone – but he could remember the title.

“I didn’t put two and two together until I read what you wrote about my dad. Your dad followed my dad, now you’re following me. It all makes sense.”

It was entirely coincidence and strange happenstance brought about by time travel correcting things in his wake, Dan wanted to protest -- even if he wasn’t one-hundred-percent certain himself. Jerry, after all, had found him awfully quick. He’d never done this before, never tracked someone he’d met before the journeys started, never travelled to the present and _right_ to where the person he’d been tracking waited. He was venturing into  brand new territory. For all he knew, it did make sense.

He wasn’t about to say that, though - Jerry didn’t seem likely to listen.

“Man, I found that article and…just…man.” There was admiration in Jerry’s voice, at severe odds with the crumpled shape of his father, discarded in a puddle of blood on the floor. “That’s when I realized the old man was right all those years ago.  ‘The Star King knows his deliverers, but knows not how to approach, knows not how to ask them to be freed…he treads on the edges of their lives, and they that learn not from his passing are swept aside…’” Jerry’s voice had an almost reverent tone as he spoke, clearly quoting something. He reached out with the knife blade to brush it along Dan’s shoulder.

“You’re like your father. You’re trapped in a mortal, dying shell, but you know that you’re more.” The knife blade pressed under Dan’s chin, tipping his head back, and he swallowed, free hand clenched against the edge of the table. “That’s why you keep coming back to us.”

Oh.

Oh boy.

“What’s that got to do with my dad?” Dan blustered, trying not to think about that blade so close. Trying to think, instead, of the pros and cons of grabbing for the knife.

“He left, didn’t he? Disappeared, left you alone…” Jerry traced the knife down across Dan’s collarbone. He seemed to be waiting for something, almost. The knife kept trailing over Dan’s skin, serrated teeth pressed to his flesh but never biting in. Never tearing. He was toying. Why?

“He never looked back, never came back…” Jerry rambled on. “That’s the way of the Star King. Your father disappeared, and the King became you.”

His bandages were gone, again. He could feel the brush of air on each of his cuts. His clothes were gone, too, other than his boxers. Apparently, Jerry wanted to see the tracks his father had left for him to follow. It felt worse this way; he felt more vulnerable than he had the first time, gooseflesh creeping up his chest and down his legs.

“So, when you die, the mantle passes to Zack. Your mind will be freed to return to what it’s meant to be…”

“Leave Zack out of this!” He tugged against the cuff, but there was no give. Nothing he could work with to pull himself free. .

Jerry shook his head. “You don’t have to worry about him anymore, Daniel. You don’t have to worry about anyone. You’ll be free soon. The Star King will ascend to a place of honor and I’ll be at his side.”

“Oh,” Dan snarled, tried to sound a lot more confident than he felt. “You’re making a New World Order, huh?”

Jerry disregarded his words, still talking with that reverent, dreamy tone, flipping the knife from hand to hand. “You’ll show your majesty, and the faithful will flock to my side in your name…”

“If they were the faithful,” Dan pointed out, voice shaking, “th-they never would have left, would they?”

Jerry tapped the flat of the blade against Dan’s lips, briefly, and for a split second Dan thought he was going to push it into his mouth, like his father had. He clamped his teeth shut as Jerry just kept talking.

“You don’t know what you’re saying. Your mortal husk fears death…” He leaned over Dan, pressing the edge of the knife’s blade to the center of Dan’s sternum, where his father had left the shallowest of the cuts seven days – or thirty years – ago. “You’ll be alright.”

If he craned his head, he could just see his pants lying discarded on the floor. His cell phone was probably still in the pocket. At least, that meant Jack and the reinforcements could still find him.  If they were coming. 

 _No, when. When they come. They’re_ _coming. They have to be coming.  
_

 “What’re you looking for, Daniel?” Jerry asked, his head cocked to the side. His eyes followed Dan’s stare, despite the way Dan hurriedly looked to the ceiling. He chuckled, lightly, at that, the blade moving away from Dan’s skin.

“Were you looking for this, maybe?” Dan’s eyes flickered towards his attacker involuntarily; Jerry bent over and lifted a twisted mass of plastic from the floor.

His phone, stomped _flat_.

Dan stared at it for a second before his stomach plummeted. He lunged upright, jerked against the handcuff, and strained against the manacles at his ankles, his free hand outstretched towards Jerry and the knife. Movement hurt worse than anything – short of the actual wounding – to writhe against the metal, to pull against the bonds as Jerry just watched, but if the phone was gone…

If the phone was gone, there was no way to see if he had succeeded, if Hannah had listened and continued to fight, or if he was tied there like a sacrificial lamb, waiting for the voice of reason that would never ever come. Waiting to be carved open just like the older Kaplan, crumpled on the floor.

Jerry watched impassively from just outside of Dan’s reach, sitting on the dusty stairs.  

_He’s expecting you to tire yourself out._

That realization sapped the fight from him faster than anything. He collapsed back to the table, feeling the smooth wood pressing against his shoulder blades. And still Jerry sat. Still Jerry stared.

“Alright,” Dan growled, straining to watch him and trying not to think about his own fear.  “So you got me, you’re gonna _free_ me, rule the world, _whatever._ What’re you waiting for?” Jerry’s eyes skated the perimeter of the room, taking in the empty walls, the bare floor. Dan followed, trying to get a handle on what the unstable man might be thinking.

_It’s still not…not perfect. There’s still something missing._

And Dan realized.

“It’s…too quiet, isn’t it? There aren’t enough people here, it’s not like you remember.”

Jerry made a soft noise in his throat – not confirmation, but not really an argument either. “The faithful will come.” His words were soft, careful. “I sent forth the call. They’ll gather here and they’ll see.”

“The faithful?” _Just keep talking_. “Who…?”

“Those who served as priests with him,” Jerry said, still soft and distant, “And…the rest of his children.”

 _Hannah. That’s how Jack’s going to find me. Jerry invited Hannah back._ The thought wasn’t a complete relief, but it eased away _some_ of the tension from his aching limbs.

He relaxed a bit too soon, though, because Jerry shook his head, as if he was coming out of a trance. He shifted the knife, letting its serrated edge flash silver. Dan, startled, grabbed for the hilt and Jerry’s hand alike.

He missed on both counts. The blade hit his palm and kept going, cutting deep into his hand in a gout of red and a deluge of new pain. He dragged the knife up Dan’s palm to the inside of Dan’s wrist, gave a sharp twist that sank fire _deep_ into his skin.

“But,” he said over Dan’s surprised shriek of pain, “I guess there’s nothing wrong with starting a little early.”

*

Jerry yanked the knife free, and the blood flowed from Dan’s hand frighteningly quick. He started the rest shallow, started the rest slowly, but the razor-sharp blade still slashed over each of the old gashes, cutting through the bristly black stitches with a strange, pain-filled efficiency.

Dan didn’t bother to _try_ to stay quiet this time. If the others were looking for him, the sounds might even _help._ Frustration flowed through him, coupled with fear and anger and pain, and he loosed it all at the man tormenting him in a constant stream of curses and insults, while one thought continued through his brain.

_Come on, Hannah. Don’t let me down, don’t…_

“Shh, shh, Daniel,” Jerry just _crooned_ when Dan’s breath finally failed and he actually _sobbed_ , curled in on himself as best he could. Jerry reached out and grabbed his sliced hand, pulled his arm out, and stabbed the blade into his wrist.

The red-smeared metal sank deep, the skin around it throbbing as it split. Dan jerked at the feeling, trying to pull away desperately. Jerry was just beginning to twist the knife deeper when the knock came on the front door. It was a gentle sound; Dan could barely hear it over the tattoo his heartbeat in his ears. He gasped in a shuddery breath when Jerry paused, pulled the blade away.

“Who could that be…?” His eyes brightened, and he wiped his bloodied hands off on his robe, adding more red to the rust already there.

“W-w-why,” Dan stuttered out, “Why d-don’t you go see?”

The knife slid through the meager space between the handcuff cuff and Dan’s wrist, and Jerry left it there, the blade just brushing his skin. “Stay put,” Jerry warned needlessly, stepping away from the table, heading for the back door, his feet scuffing up clouds of dust.

Dan tried to do the opposite, but his no matter how he moved his arm, his free hand wasn’t working quite right; it wouldn’t close around the hilt the way he needed it to. He could only watch the blood from the reopened cuts pooling on his skin, dripping down onto the table.

*

The security chain on the front door still worked, despite the fact that it seemed somewhat _pointless_ , given the state of the front windows.

Jerry left it attached, regardless, when he pulled the door open an inch, peering out. Dan lay watching him numbly, stymied by his own body. His own wounds declaring, simply, _enough is enough._ He couldn’t see who stood outside the door, but he had his own suspicions, for all the pain tried to hold them at bay. _  
_

“ _Hannah_?” The relief in Jerry’s voice was unmistakable, as was the excitement in his stance as he fumbled the chain off. “Hannah, you actually _came_!”

“Yeah, kiddo.” Hannah’s voice was unmistakable. “It’s me. Sorry…I am so sorry I didn’t come sooner.”

There was genuine regret in her words. It was echoed in her expression when Jerry hustled her into the house and into Dan’s line of sight, slamming the door and relocking it in his sister’s wake. Whether the regret was actually aimed at Jerry or at Dan or at six of one, half a dozen of the other, Dan could not say.

“No, no no no, it’s better late than never,” Jerry insisted, rubbing his hands on his robe again. “I didn’t…I almost didn’t think you’d come, the _last_ time I wrote you…” A shallow reflection of Hannah’s regret danced across his face. “I wasn’t…I wasn’t very nice.”

“The past is past,” Hannah said with a shrug, reaching out to take his hand, doing a fine job of ignoring the red under his fingernails. “We can’t go back and change it, not like _him_ …” She reached out, ghosting her other hand across Dan’s sweaty hair. Dan flinched away, not certain what she was doing, exactly. She laced her hand through the short locks and gave a little tug. “Not _yet_ , anyway…”

“…you came around too?” Jerry asked, his apparent elation apparently overwhelming any doubts he might have had. “You see what Dad was teaching all that time?”

“Would I be here if I didn’t?” Hannah countered, letting go of Dan’s hair. “The others are still blinded, but…once the Star King’s true splendor is revealed they will understand.” Her lips quirked in a tiny smile as Dan let his eyes drift closed, just for a minute. “It’ll be just you and me. Just like old times.”

“…just like old times,” Jerry agreed, and by the scuffing of their footsteps they were moving away. Dan forced his eyes open. Jerry was, in fact, pulling his sister by the hand. “I need to get you your robe…”

The room fell silent as they disappeared.

Seconds later, the crunch of broken glass broke that silence. Dan’s gaze shot to the destroyed windows, his tired eyes focusing on the blessedly familiar faces of Jack and…

_Livia?_

“Wh-what are _you_ doing h-here?” He mumbled as Livia bit back a curse, already pulling her hair out of its elegant bun. She shoved the bobby pin she’d retrieved into the lock, twisting it with the ease born of practice.

“She’s keeping me from _shooting him_ for starters,” Jack growled as he stripped off his belt, looping it around Dan’s other wrist, above the deep gash in his arm. He pulled it tight just as Livia pulled Dan’s arm free of the cuff, moved to start on his ankles. “Something about what I _want_ to do not always being what I’m _supposed_ to do…?”

“She’s right,” Dan mumbled dazedly. Livia muttered something – it _may_ have been ‘ _finally, he admits it_ ,’ or he might have been projecting that. “You remember Aeden? He was because I did what I _wanted_ to do.”

_And even after all he’s done, it still doesn’t feel like killing Jerry is what we’re supposed to do._

“Well, I’m not…I’m not _like_ you; does that mean the same rules apply?” Jack asked as Livia helped Dan upright. Jack’s makeshift tourniquet had cut off the steady flow from the deep wounds, but he’d already lost enough blood - been hit enough times - that the simple little motion made the whole room spin. He was about to answer when Livia lay a gentle hand on the small of his back, stilling him.

“You know what’s going on, Jack,” She said, her voice stern. “That’s just about as good. You’re just going to have to _trust_ us. We need this to _end_ – just not with a bullet.”

Dan grunted when Livia and Jack helped him off the table together. He could feel their tension – he knew Jack had seen Livia at one point, but this…this was the first time he’d seen Livia and his brother together in the present. It was odd, to say the least – past and present colliding in a surreal way.

“Well,” Jack snarked back, his voice a harsh whisper. “I’m all for it ending. I need a break from the hospital.”

If Dan’s answering laugh was a little bit crazed, he felt it could be forgiven, given the circumstances. “You need a break? _You_ need a break?”

“ _Yeah_ I need a break, the last thing I need is Theresa deciding to go to the police after all, or seeing you disappear and show up with something _else_ wrong, or-”

“Boys!” Livia barked. “Now is _not the time._ ”

Both men stopped whispering, gave each other a sheepish look, and looked as one to Livia.

“Sorry.”

Livia _hmphed_ under her breath, and began to lead them back to the window and to the relative safety outside. Each step seemed to take longer and longer and they were only halfway there when Dan’s knees gave out. He hit the floor with a thud, and would have fallen flat on his face if not for the arms under his.

“Dan, get up, we need to _move_ …”

“Leaving so _soon_?” The voice made Livia and Jack freeze, looking up, both of them poised to help Dan back to his feet. Dan just stayed on the floor, staring at the ceiling, almost entirely sure he had the whole thing memorized by this point: every water stain, every chipped tile, every little discolored speck.

“You always did like to leave in a hurry,” Jerry snarled as he strode between them and the window, Hannah trailing on his heels.

 Gentle hands under his arms hauled him halfway upright before his knees shook again; they stopped pulling at his wordless gasp of pain, and he rested on his knees, blinking his eyes against the darkness at the edges of his vision. Hannah had changed; she now wore the robe they’d gone to find and in one hand she held a fairly large gun. She trained it on Dan as they watched, as Jerry continued.

“But this is where you’re _from_. You told us that yourself. You have nowhere to go…” His hand slipped into his sleeve; when he brought it out, he held a new knife. It looked just about as sharp as the last one. “And while _he_ might want to shoot me, he _can’t_.” Jerry met Jack’s eyes then, speaking slowly and deliberately. “Because if you so much as _reach_ for your gun, Officer Vassar, Hannah will shoot your brother. He’ll die either way.” He shifted a little closer, barking out a laugh when Jeremy and Livia both turned to glare at Hannah.  

“She told me _herself_. She knows where her true loyalties should lie.” He paced in front of the windows, the knife glittering in the moonlight when he raised it, not noticing the way Hannah shifted behind him. His shadow was long on the bare stone floor. “You know, none of Dad’s prophecies say the King needs to be _alive_ when I skin him free…”

Dan pulled free from Jack’s supporting hand, tried to scramble upright, out of Jerry’s shadow and path, but Jerry lunged toward him faster than he could get his feet to cooperate.

The blade was already arcing downwards when a loud, electrical crackle filled the air. The cultist suddenly jerked and began twitching, his fingers convulsing around the new knife’s hilt before he fell to the floor, flat on his face.

Katie stood outside the window, moonlight turning her hair into a silvery halo and reflecting off the main unit of Jack’s police-issue taser, still clutched tight in her shaking hand.

“Not today,” she snarled, glaring down at Jerry’s shaking form.

“Not today,” Hannah repeated as she hurried to her brother’s side. She reached out a hand, and Livia passed over the handcuffs that had bound Dan to the table. Katie shut off the taser. Hannah snapped the cuffs on before Jerry could move.

“And not _ever_.”

*

“Why?” Jerry asked, quietly, ten minutes later. The would-be cultist sat leaned against the wall, separated from where Dan leaned by several feet.

Several feet _and_ Hannah, _and_ Livia, _and_ Jack, _and_ Katie. Jack had called the police and an ambulance, and their sirens were getting louder in the distance. Dan –safe in Katie’s arms - strained to listen past them, to hear what Hannah would say.

“Because…” Hannah said, slowly, “…we all know this is not you.”

Katie snorted faintly into Dan’s hair; Jack appeared on the verge of speaking, but Livia just gave them both a look.

“Daniel never came to you, to us, so we could free him. He came so we could free _us_.”

Jerry blinked at his sister in incomprehension. “I don’t…”

“Don’t worry,” Hannah said, her voice reassuring and calm. “You don’t have to understand yet. You just…” She smiled, lopsided. “You invited me and I came. Now you have to take my invitation.” She reached out and nudged her brother’s shoulder. “I’ll take care of you.”

Grey eyes met grey eyes, searching for…something. Some hint of duplicity, some sign of an outright lie. As the red and white flashing lights of the police cars and the ambulance flooded the space between the street and the run down old house, Jeremy Kaplan, Junior gave his big sister a slow, solemn nod.

Dan felt the fist of tension that had clenched around his spine slowly loosen and fade, clamoring instincts dissipate into a hazy relief.

It might have been shock, it might have been blood loss, or it might have been the cosmic confirmation that they’d finished the job, but one way or another, it was all over.

A hand closed on his shoulder, shaking him out of his dazed reverie. He focused on Jack’s face.

“Now, just think. You get to help me explain this to Theresa.”


	11. Chapter 11

Epilogue

In the end, it wasn’t that hard – Jerry was all over the news for days. It was easy enough to pin Dan’s mysterious injuries on Jerry’s stalker-like behavior and a falsified story of threats against the rest of his family.

It was far from the real truth, but it was enough that Theresa now saw him as something more noble and self-sacrificing than she considered him previously.

(She still, Jack mentioned, thought he was insane, but it was a start. At least she was willing to _not_ disown him as an uncle once the baby came. )

He was going to need therapy for his hand. Jerry hadn’t been as careful as his dad. The doctors were optimistic, though, and Dan was willing to take that as a win.

(Hugh still wasn’t willing to transcribe his article ideas, so he started with Zack. It was good for handwriting _and_ spelling practice. The system worked until Katie caught him describing a bank robbery. Then it was back to the one-handed typing.)  

There were still nights he woke up sweating and tangled in blankets and feeling every limb, his jaw, his throat for the wounds. Those nights, Katie held him close (but never held his hands, never at night) and whispered calm things, soothing things, and sometimes the closeness became more. She was always strong at night.

She was strong at night, but during the day…

(During the day, Dan got used to phone calls at all hours, got used to staying home in the evenings, and got used to Katie checking to make sure he was still where he was supposed to be. Zack got used to board-games and video-games and not so much running around. The peewee soccer team got used to Zack staying home; the school – and then the daycare when school ended - got used to Katie picking Zack up, and only Katie.)

And then, one day, it wasn’t Katie.

*

“Who’s picking up Zack?” Dan asked as Katie met him on the porch after work. She gave him a cat-like smile, somewhat sly, somewhat pleased, and he frowned, puzzled by the change in routine. “It can’t be Jack, he _just_ called me from work…”

“Not Jack, no,” Katie confirmed as she took his good hand, pulled him over to sit on the steps.

_Not Jack. Not…  
_

“Not Theresa?” He ventured.

Katie shook her head again, giving him a fond look that, nevertheless, seemed to convey that she thought he was displaying a remarkable lack of intelligence. “Not with the new baby, no. You know how germy that daycare is, doctor or no doctor, she shouldn’t be near them.”

“I don’t…someone new?”

“Someone new.”

“I don’t understand,” Dan said. “You…you’ve spent the last three months…”

“Pushing everything outside, I know.” Her fingers traced the scars on Dan’s wrist gingerly. “I…had a good talk the other day with this someone new.”

“Oh? Did they walk away with all their limbs intact?” Dan teased, leaning against his wife, pushing her sideways until she poked him in the ribs with her elbow.

“Yes. She just…she pointed out that…well. What…what Kaplan did to you wasn’t healthy…but what I was doing to you two, what I was doing to myself, wasn’t healthy either.” Her eyes went faraway for a moment. “I just thought…maybe if I kept you inside, everything else would stay outside.”

“And,” Dan said, deadpan, rather than thinking about Kaplan, “that worked out _so_ well.” Three months and seven journeys lay between him and the knives. He was ready to forget it now.

“Shush, you,” Katie snapped back, but her tone was playful. “We just…we talked about how…how I can’t protect you from everything, all the time, as long as I make sure to protect you from the big things.”

Dan could hear voices now, Zack’s cheerful, mile-a-minute patter floating up the block. He started to stand, and Katie stopped him with a hand on his elbow. “I’ll protect you here and now. She’ll protect you there and then. And maybe between the two of us, we’ll be able to protect you in the times that aren’t either.”

“…you don’t mean…” Zack and Livia both grinned at him when he turned around. “How…?” He just stared at Livia, who gave him a little shrug.

“What can I say?” She asked, lightly, as Zack let go of her hand and ran to give Katie a bear-hug. “I was in the area.”

She looked at Katie, expression questioning. Katie gave her a nod, and Livia’s grin brightened.

“See you round, Zack!” Zack was too busy jumping on Dan’s back to answer, so Livia turned her gaze to Dan’s. “He’s a good kid. Keep him that way!”

“We’ll try,” Dan replied, raising a hand. Livia just laughed as she started to walk back down the block.

“Don’t bother saying goodbye to me, Dan,” she called back, her voice carrying on the breeze. “I’ll see you soon enough.”

He wasn’t sure if he stopped being able to see her because she rounded the corner, or because she wasn’t _there_ anymore. He just shook his head, and looked askance at Katie.

“She called ten minutes before Zack was supposed to leave daycare. I don’t think it will be a regular occurrence. But…it was nice to talk to her again.”

 _Yeah, but what’s that mean for my future sanity?_ He shook the thought off, prying Zack off his shoulders and setting him down on the porch. Zack started to head for the door, but paused on the threshold, looking at his parents.

“Daddy?”

“Yeah, buddy?”

“Does this mean I can go play now?”

Dan met Katie’s eyes over Zack’s head, a question in his gaze. Katie watched him for a second before she finally gave a little nod, a little smile.

“Sure thing. I think that would be a good idea.” He flexed his fingers, his palm still aching, but his heart lighter than it had been for ages. “I think from now on it’d be a good idea for all of us to just….go outside.”

  
*


End file.
